A trip to California
Date: 2026-03-13T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: United States -- Description and travel; Farm life; Joseph Keasbey Brick agricultural; industrial and normal school; Enfield; N.C.; African Americans -- North Carolina

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Title: A trip to California
and several addresses to the Negro farmers' congress of North Carolina

Author: Thomas Sewell Inborden

Release date: March 13, 2026 [eBook #78199]

Language: English

Original publication: Raleigh: Mitchell Printing Company, 1922

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78199

Credits: Bob Taylor, Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A TRIP TO CALIFORNIA ***

August 15, 1922

Supplementary to the Brick News

A TRIP TO CALIFORNIA
And Several Addresses to the
Negro Farmers’ Congress of
North Carolina

BRICK SCHOOL IN RETROSPECT

By Principal T. S. INBORDEN
Joseph Keasby Brick Agricultural, Industrial and Normal School
Bricks, North Carolina

President of the North Carolina Negro Farmers Congress
President of the North Carolina Negro Historical Association
Twenty-seven years Principal of Brick School

MITCHELL PRINTING CO., RALEIGH

INTRODUCTORY

April 22, 1922.

My Dear Friend:

You will be interested to know that I am again back from my five months trip to the North and Northwest. While away I covered, according to the railroad time tables, about twelve thousand miles. This took me through most of the Northern States and the New England States and in the Western States.

I left Chicago the 21st of January and visited and stopped at the following places: St. Paul and Minneapolis in Minnesota; Aberdeen in South Dakota; Marmarth in North Dakota; Miles City, Three Forks, Butte and Gerson Hot Springs in Montana; crossing Idaho into Spokane, Washington. We crossed the Continental Divide a few miles east of Butte in four or five feet of snow in an elevation of six thousand feet above sea level. This train was pulled by powerful electrical engines for six hundred miles over the most picturesque mountains in the world. We crossed the tributaries of the great Missouri River more than a score of times, and scaled many mountains, from the highest elevations and glided down into Seattle, Washington, into an elevation of fifteen feet on Puget Sound. Trees were budding and many flowers were already in bloom. After a few days we went to Tacoma in Washington and Portland in Oregon. Then we were off to Sacramento, San Francisco in California. The course took us from the beginning of the Sacramento River in the Siskiyou and Shasta Mountains to its mouth at San Francisco Bay or to the Straits of Carquinez, landing us at Port Costa for Richmond, Berkley and Oakland in Alameda County. At the fine Oakland pier we disembarked from the train and took the ferry boat four miles to San Francisco, passing the Government Island to the left looking right into the setting sun through the Golden Gate.

A few days here in this beautiful setting and we were off for Los Angeles, five hundred miles to the south still. Fresno, Bakersfield, Tehachapi, across the snow-clad Sierra Madre ten thousand feet elevation and in sight of Mount Whitney four thousand feet higher. Down a mountain incline for fifty or more miles to Mojave Desert into Death Valley and to San Fernando and Burbank and Los Angeles. Then to the Orange Show at San Bernardino, passing on our way Pomona, San Gabriel, Claremont and Garrett & Co.’s grape vineyards, one of the homes of the Virginia Dare Extracts. Mr. Garrett is an Enfield man. We could spend only a few days at Los Angeles, then we were off the Coast Route to San Francisco again. Santa Barbara, Ventura, Guadaloupe, San Luis Obispo, Delmonte, Santa Cruz, San Jose, Santa Clara, Red Wood Cities are familiar names. It took three steam engines to pull the train over the mountains coming north. A few days later we were off again for Sacramento, and Salt Lake City in Utah, and Glenwood Hot Springs in Colorado. Passing Florence we came into sight of Pike’s Peak more than a hundred miles east of us, and passing the water-swept city of Pueblo and Colorado Springs into Denver the mile high city. A few days spent here and I was off again for Phillipsburg and Des Moines and to Chicago, coming through Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa and Illinois. I spent a few days in Chicago, was held up on my arrival from the station to my stopping place in Chicago, but was not robbed. My outcry for “Police and help!” thwarted their plans. Then I was off to Washington City and home on the 22nd of March. At the station I was overwhelmed by the students, teachers and friends in the community who had come to welcome me home with school yells and band music.

I traveled two thousand miles in California alone. I gave twenty-eight addresses, attended eight recitals, fourteen lectures, four theaters where persons of color were the stars, three ministers’ meetings, one annual conference, the meeting of the American Missionary Association, the annual meeting of the Connecticut Congregational Association, visited ten colleges and schools, nine state capitals, seventeen city, state and municipal and school museums, twenty public markets. In addition I talked with Japanese and Chinese farmers, fruit growers, cattle men, sheep men, miners, negro ranchmen. I met them on the trains, on the farms, in the hotels and restaurants, on the boats, on the streets, in the stores, markets, and everywhere. I came back with a few pounds less in weight, but with a vision that money could not buy.

I am very truly, T. S. Inborden.

JUST A MINUTE

I am here for only a couple of days. It is a long ways from Bricks, North Carolina, to Seattle, Washington. I still have two thousand miles before me before I turn my face eastward. One gets an idea of this great big country only by traveling over it, as I have done for the past three months. He can get it no other way. Such a trip ought to condition every young man graduating from an Eastern college.

Here we go from Bricks in the eastern part of North Carolina to Washington City. The Atlantic Coast Line train takes us through the most historic setting of the Coastal Plains of that eastern section into the foothills of the Old Dominion, through the Civil War battlegrounds of national fame, up the historic Potomac, passing Richmond, Fredericksburg, the rustic triangular monument to the great general who in his unfortunate retreat met death at the hands of his own men, into Alexandria, the most historic and conservative town of the pre-war days. Alexandria, the other end of the old pike leading from the “far west” through Winchester Town seventy-five or more miles away. This old pike was put in history by Sheridan’s ride, twenty miles away from Winchester Town.

Well, we cannot stop in Washington City. It needs nothing that I can say. From Washington we went up into Old Virginia. Taking the Southern train we went through the Virginia Valley and the Shenandoah Valley. The trip took us right through the heart of the battle-fought country of Manassas, Bull Run, over “Goose Creek,” “Painter Skin,” “Jeffries”—creeks that are well known to all Virginians. We went right into the heart of the Old Blue Ridge, and looking down on Harper’s Ferry, Winchester, Middleburg, Leesburg, Upperville, Berryville, the Shenandoah River, on to Washington itself, sixty miles away. Here are five counties: Fauquier, Loudon, Warren, Clark, Jefferson and others in the distance, covering an area of more than ten thousand square miles of the finest country in the world, all to be seen from one level space without moving ten feet on this historic old mountain. Corn, wheat, cattle, and sheep, fill her valleys. There is no part of these valleys and mountains that cannot, and that do not, grow the finest apples and peaches that are grown in the world. (I am saying this in Seattle, Washington.)

I went back to Washington from this fine country, and from Washington to Jersey City. From there I went over to New York and Brooklyn, and out on Long Island Sound. From New York I went to Springfield, Mass. From Springfield I went to the great meeting of the American Missionary Association, which was held at New London, Connecticut. From there I went back to New Haven for Armistice Day and to see Marshal Foch receive his degree from Yale, and the great football game where there were eighty thousand people. I went back to New York again, where I put in two very profitable weeks studying racial and living conditions.

From New York City I went to Rochester and put in several days speaking here and there to small groups of people. From there I went to Batavia for only a few hours, and then to the city of Buffalo. From Buffalo to Cleveland and Oberlin, Ohio, and in two weeks on to Detroit, Mich. A few days spent in Detroit, and I was on my way to Ann Arbor, Jackson and Kalamazoo, Mich. I reached Chicago a few days before the Christmas holidays. After the Christmas vacation I visited the high schools of Gary, Indiana, and put in another week attending the Mid-Winter Conference of Congregational Workers of the United States. Only three other colored men were in attendance at this conference. They were Dr. Alfred Lawless, of New Orleans; Dr. Kingsley, of Cleveland; Dr. C. W. Burton, of Chicago.

We learned in this great Mid-Winter Conference that there are other problems besides the Negro problem. Indeed, he was scarcely discussed at all.

Immediately after the Conference I turned my face westward. It did not seem safe that I should go alone to buy my ticket and to have my money put into travelers cheques before leaving, so our good friend, Mr. J. E. Wade, of the police force, offered his services and accompanied me to the bank and ticket office. Mr. Wade was formerly from Elerby, N. C. He and his nephew from Richmond County are giving fine services on the police force of Chicago. I was told that they have about a hundred colored men on the police force. All of these men are giving excellent service. I was surprised and glad to see in many of the largest business houses in Chicago our colored men and women doing business over the counters. I saw them in the shipping houses and in the ticket offices. In the city postoffice of Chicago I was told by one of the “checkers” that out of about eight thousand or more employees that nearly two thousand were colored. I was escorted through every department of the great postoffice and saw the men handling the nine hundred tons of mail that go through the office every day. Many of the men I knew personally, and some were relatives. Most of the men were experts at their job. A very large number of them are graduates from our best colleges. All of them were fine looking, well groomed men. They were not the least in appearance when compared with the other racial groups.

From Chicago I took the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul train to St. Paul. The glacial swept areas of Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota abounds with natural resources aside from the farm products. This is a community of wheat, corn and flour mills. It is the home of the world’s best packing houses. Minnesota is the synonym for “Gold Medal”; it also says the last word on poultry feed and products. I was shown through a sanitary packing-house where nearly or quite a thousand people were given employment. Coffee, tea, spices and sugar and other commodities are shipped in daily by the train loads and made into new products, repacked and shipped out daily to all parts of the world. The amount of all sorts of candy, cakes, etc., handled was a revelation. Machinery has taken care of every operation in this great establishment, except the absolute thought of man. To the uninitiated it might seem to think also. The world’s best brand of cheese comes from these parts also. I was surprised to learn that one little community east of St. Paul, in Wisconsin, called Rio, shipped two years ago more than two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars worth of the finest grades of tobacco.

Some of the soldier boys will be interested to know that some of the buildings, probably most of them, at Camp Douglass were still intact as we sped by them through the cliffs and dells.

From St. Paul we turned our face westward for a two thousand mile jaunt on one of the best equipped and finest trains that ever rolled the iron. Not a minute late on its own account, up hill, down grade, across deep canyons, under the mountains, over the top of the mountains, spanning valleys, across the river beds and lowlands, with the same speed, whether in eight feet of snow on the Cascade Mountains or whether there is no snow, and on to the Pacific Coast. Pulled by the most powerful electric engines in the world, she leaps onward by the touch of her engineer like a thing of life and thought.

Our first stop was in Aberdeen, in South Dakota. It was night on our arrival, and I left the train to spend the night for the rest, so that I might have the day to see—yes, just to see. I had been to Aberdeen in 1909 and knew what to expect. The porter advised me not to go out without wrapping up well, as it was about twenty degrees below zero. I went to the first place where the sign read “hotel.” I was comfortably located, and after I had gotten a lunch thought I would find the school where I once spoke, but before I had gone very far I decided that my room was the best place for a stranger in that sort of weather. My face could not have been colder if it had been buried for twenty minutes between two blocks of ice. This particular community is noted for its fine quality of white potatoes. They are grown in great quantities, and they are the last word in potato growing. There are none any better anywhere else in the world for flavor and texture.

In a country so cold and bleak one would not expect to find much vegetation. Quick maturing crops of wheat and corn are grown. Hogs, cattle and sheep abound. For hundreds of miles in every direction there is absolutely nothing but a barren track of land which affords great quantities of the finest hay, which grows naturally. Every mile looks for the world just like the one from which you have just come. There is nothing to break the monotony of the landscape except the monotony of another one. The porter or conductor comes in and says, “Twin Brooks,” “Stone Falls,” “Odessa,” etc., and you look out when the snow does not blind the view and you see nothing but a few houses, a wheat elevator, or a lot of sleds drawn by two or four horses; not a tree except perhaps a few planted by the government agents. As you reach the North Dakota line not a tree to mark even the site of the little towns that may be more pretentious.

At Marmarth we come into Montana at an elevation of 2700 feet, having put behind us nine hundred and ninety-five miles since leaving Chicago. We have already passed Wakpala, an Indian Reservation, and school. These are easily in sight. We have also left the Missouri River and the Little Missouri River behind. We come into Musselshell Division, and soon cross the Yellowstone River. Miles City is our station for the night. It is nearly twelve hundred miles out of Chicago with 2300 feet elevation. Several smaller tributaries to the Yellowstone River are passed. Small shrubbery and a few trees in the river courses are a great relief to the landscape. But before we reach the “City” to which we are destined for the night we come into “Bad Lands.” Here nature went into contortions and left an awful frown upon her face. I asked the white porter, a very fine fellow (a Lutheran by faith), what was the matter with the country. He said “This is Bad Lands.”

Miles City was not a bad looking city. It had all the modern improvements. For several hundred miles we followed the valleys of the Musselshell River and the Yellowstone River, crossing and recrossing the rivers and valleys, sometimes over a high mountain and then almost precipitously down and under another mountain, only to rejoin the river again through another tortuous valley. We reached the Rocky Mountains Division at Harlowton, Montana, thirteen hundred miles west of Chicago at an elevation of 4,000 feet. If you have any heart trouble you will know that something outside in the physical world has happened before you get here. On we go over the “Summitt of Big Belts” literally up, up, up, around this curve, across that ravine, up by this tall hill, finally on the top, and you look back for five, ten, fifteen or twenty miles and you see the ribbon of track you have spun out. You see the thousands of waste acres of snow and the cattle hugging the hills for protection against the winter’s cold. They are inured to it. Ours would die the first night out. The reader would get sleepy before he had spent one hour out there. That is the way you freeze to death; you just get sleepy. We pass Ringling, the Montana Canyon, and again miles further Montana Canyon, with rocks projecting hundreds of feet above you, still we speed along and cross the great Missouri River seven hundred miles above where we crossed a few days ago. Near Eustis we cross the Jefferson, Madison, Gallitin rivers forming the Missouri River. Bull Mountains have been left three hundred miles behind and still we speed along. Our horse neither tires nor pants. They feed him “white coal” generated at great substations from fifty to a hundred miles apart. Generated by mountain streams in their mad rush to the great bosom of waters.

At dark I wanted to stop at some small mining town for the night so as not to miss any scenery. The conductor advised against this because of the condition of the people and their accommodation for strangers. I listened, and stopped at his advice at Three Forks, almost fifteen hundred miles out from Chicago, and still 4,000 feet elevation. This was in a valley of farming land of more than three hundred thousand acres of the best farming land in Montana. The great valley was very beautiful, with the mountains ten, twenty, thirty, fifty and a hundred miles away in every direction, silhouetted above the clouds, and dotted with its own shadows. As the sun came up from the east and spread its majesty over the snow-clad peaks every one was made a diamond of beauty. But we were not to stay at Three Forks over Sunday. We are traveling on trains 15 and 17. If we leave 15 over night we take 17 the next morning, and so we had 15 or 17 every day. At 8:50 we departed in very cold weather—ten degrees below zero, they said. It was only three hours ride from Butte, Montana. I did not want to pass the highest point reached on the whole trip in the dark. I wanted to have my eyes open and see when I went over the real top. Well I did. It was 10:53 by my watch—1,505 miles out from Chicago, 6,322 feet elevation.

The writer of the “Ex-Colored Man” said when he was in Paris with his landlord he was very fond of music, etc., and so one night he went to one of the finest theaters in the city. Soon after he had taken his seat a very aristocratic looking gentleman came in whom he had at one time seen at his mother’s house in the state of Georgia. He was very small at the time he saw him in Georgia, and he was sure it was the same gentleman. He had with him his beautiful wife and a more beautiful daughter. To his amazement they sat almost adjoining him in the theater so close that he might have touched them. They did not know him. He knew that it was his own father, and this beautiful girl just finishing high school was his own sister, flesh and blood. He wanted to speak, but conventionality and tradition had closed his mouth, and to save tragedy he arose and left in silence.

I have looked forward all my life for just such an opportunity to see this great country, as I have now had, and as I am having, because I still have 5,000 miles ahead. Most of my younger life was spent in trying to get an education. Most of my grown life has been spent in missionary service on small salary, and with a family of children to educate and prepare for a larger life than I had the opportunity of having. This opportunity now comes to me through the officials and friends of the American Missionary Association under whose auspices I have worked for thirty-two years. It comes as an appreciation on their part for my long service. I may not have done everything they wanted me to do, but I have tried to follow the dictates of an honest conviction.

When I passed over the great Continental Divide I remembered my dream of forty years. I knew no one and had no one to talk to about it. I looked into space and thanked the Lord of all of us that I had cast my lot where the rewards had been faithful and abundant. I felt like crying out in paroxisms of joy.

We are still “a-going.” We reached Butte, Montana, at noon Sunday, January 29th. It was very cold, but I found a good hotel near the station, so that I did not have to be in the cold very long. I was advised and was quick in deciding that I would in an hour take the trip to Gerson Hot Springs, eighteen miles away. Several miles from the place I saw what seemed to be smokestacks with steam pouring out each one. I found on arrival that these were just openings in the roof, forming vents for the steam from the hot water as it comes from the mountains at a temperature of 195 degrees. The water has wonderful healing properties. I did not take the bath because of the extreme temperature outside. The hot springs are very numerous in these parts of the country. All the rivers were frozen several feet deep but here and there where the streams pass very close to the mountain gorges one can see the temperature of the water change by the warmer currents coming right out of the hills.

Butte is the largest mining center in the world. One hill is the richest hill in all the world—is worth more than all of Wall Street, New York. The bar-iron, copper, silver, gold, and other by-products probably go down to the center of the earth. I went 2,200 feet down, and I was then 800 feet from the bottom of it. I was donned in a real miner’s outfit, including a miner’s acetelyne lamp. Our descending cage was about four feet square, and held four men. It was built to bring up twenty tons of ore about every minute of the day. State laws define how fast human beings shall be brought up or taken down. The installation that operates this mine cost more than a million dollars. It is the finest electrical outfit I ever saw. The house in which the machinery is located that operates the pulleys, under air pressure, is more than a hundred feet square. When the signals are given, twenty-eight feet down, one man brings the load to the tenth of an inch exactness to any level in the pit or on top of the ground, a hundred feet high if necessary. Thousands of wheels, belts, pulleys, pistons, etc., move in every part of this building to the touch of one man. If he makes a single mistake it may cost one life or a thousand in the mine. It may cost a mint of money in destruction. Efficiency, absolute efficiency is the only thing that counts.

Five very large pumps about twelve feet square each bring up the surplus water from below. They are located many feet below the surface of the ground, and it is never cold down there. The water is charged with copper, and this disintegrates any other metals, so that the pipes must be lined with wood and brass. This water is run through long troughs over old tin cans and iron waste, where the copper is deposited and afterwards taken off. I did not have time to get all the details of the process. Mr. J. D. Rockefeller, I was told, owned most of the stock of this particular mine.

In the morning of the same day I visited one of the best schools in this country. It was a city high school. Everything taught in this school leads to mining. That is the big job there. The youths are prepared to do the things they will have to do when they leave school. Boys ten to fifteen years old are experts already in the machine shop.

We left at noon Tuesday, and my destination was Spokane, Washington. We crossed the Missouri River, the valley of the same name, and saw scores of apple orchards. Near East Portal we crossed Bitter Root Summit and Bitter Root Valley, also made famous by its fine apples and vegetables. We passed again under the mountains two miles. Here we were eighteen hundred miles from Chicago in an elevation more than 4,000 feet. At Superior we were delayed several hours in the night on account of a freight wreck. We arrived in Spokane about noon Thursday. We crossed the Cascade Mountains in eight feet of snow. This was after leaving Spokane. We visited the Spokane Valley, another valley made famous by its apples. I talked with a banker about the products of the community. They are trying to get emigrants from the East to come into the community. It is a farming and lumber community. I visited the exhibits of farm products kept by the chamber of commerce of the city. They are wide awake. I saw all sorts of vegetables grown on irrigated land and by dry farming methods that would make our farmers take notice. I never saw finer vegetables anywhere. They are grown under great pressure.

From Spokane 1,900 miles west of Chicago, in an elevation of 1,882 feet, we dropped down here (Seattle) in a few hours to 2,200 miles west of Chicago and to sea level. From eight feet of snow crossing into a temperature of 36 degrees above zero. No snow and no ice.

February 2nd we arrived at Seattle. Twelve days and about twenty-two hundred miles from Chicago. This is considered the chief city of all this part of the country. It has a population of about 350,000 people. Its scenic environment, with its background of mountains and its valley intersected by sounds, bays and rivers, make it the most beautiful city in the world. It is called the “Floral Paradise.” I saw many flowers blooming in the open. It is said to be the cleanest and best lighted city in the world.

I wanted to see Puget Sound, so the next morning bright and early I found my way over the network of railroads on a high elevation above the streets to the fine pier several hundred feet above the water. Here I had a fine view of the Sound and the great expanse of water and mountains yonder a few miles, and literally thousands of boats of every kind and from everywhere in the world. The place from which I made the observation was a fine room with large glass windows, leather seats, heat, restaurant, etc., to make the weary traveler rested and welcome. This was Puget Sound. This is where literacy has the highest rating of any American city. If any city is cleaner or better lighted I have yet to see it.

In these parts there are billions of feet of lumber untouched by the despoiler. I saw fir trees measuring four and six feet in diameter. I was told they were three and four hundred feet tall. I saw two men sawing with a cross-cut saw, one on one side and one on the other side, and the diameter was so great that only one man could be seen below his head.

The Sound itself is said to be large enough to contain all the navies of the world and still have more room. The diversity of scenery, its climate, air, beautiful sunshine, mountains, sounds, and inland waterways, woods, flowers, parks, fine hotel, theaters, public markets, and city railway system, postoffice, and the State University, give that place a setting hard to describe in this limited space. The three or four public markets are works of art. One on Second Street was terraced, and is the cleanest market I ever saw, and I have seen a great many. The markets will generally indicate what the farmers are doing. They show the best products raised in the community. The arrangement of these country products will give you an idea of their artistic values. The Japanese were in evidence everywhere. They were universally polite and clean. They may be ubiquitous, but they are certainly utilitarian. They know how to get the best results from the soil as farmers. They had the best things I ever saw from the farms. They are credited with having a lot of sense and of being very industrious. These are very important assets in the development of any community, whether in California or in North Carolina. Having sense means having efficiency, knowing how to do. Industry means power and wealth.

As much as I would have loved to linger here longer, I had to divide my time with other points of interest. I left there early Sunday morning, the fifth of February, for Tacoma, about forty miles away. Through miles and miles of orchards of raspberries, loganberries and blackberries, apples and pears and walnuts, passing great canning and packing houses, irrigation projects, mining sections, etc., and at 10 o’clock the Olympian rolled into Tacoma. Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helena, Mount Hood, and Mount Adams, off in the distance had already come into view. You are overwhelmed by their vastness and grandeur. Their snow-capped peaks, timbered inclines and fertile valleys cannot be equaled anywhere else in the world.

We are still on the Puget Sound. The city has a population of more than a hundred thousand souls. They represent every nationality under the sun. It has the finest harbor and the most equitable climate in the world. The rainfall is around thirty-five inches a year, which insures better farming conditions. The Chamber of Commerce of Seattle and Tacoma are vieing with each other as to which will show the best exhibits of the state. Their great varieties of wheat, corn, flax, rye, oats, grasses, barley, buckwheat, apples, pears, small fruits and nuts, and their by-products: honey, preserved fruits, tomatoes, and manufactured products, views and paintings of cattle and sheep raising, lumbering, etc., simply baffle the imagination. You want to sit and look for hours and write impressions in your notebook, and then go out and come back again and do the same thing as long as you have a minute to spare.

Tacoma has a stadium that seats forty thousand people. Nothing else like it in the United States except the college stadia at Cambridge and New Haven. Schools and churches are the finest in the whole country. It was my pleasure to speak twice the Sunday I was there in one of the largest and finest churches in the city (white), and in the evening to one of our colored churches. The museum contains pictures of the early pioneers and Indian history curios. It was in this community where the earliest white settlements were made. The stadium and Stadium High School are located on one of the highest points in the city overlooking Puget Sound, which is precipitously, several hundred feet at the base of the hill. Trains may be seen for miles and miles coming from the East and North, and boats from Alaska, Seattle and Vancouver as they turn the western promontory. I traveled with an elderly gentleman who built almost the first house in that part of the city for the father of the present occupant, and I also had dinner in that house overlooking the stadium and the Sound. The minister living in the house is an eastern man, and his wife is the daughter of a missionary to Honolulu. She went over in the Morning Star soon after its construction forty years ago, in company with President Fairchild of Oberlin College. At that time she was a small child.

The state of Washington produced in 1921 28,000,000 bushels of apples alone that were worth more than $30,000,000. At the same time New York is said to have produced 14,000,000, California 6,000,000, and Michigan 6,000,000 bushels of apples. At the time Spokane County, in which Spokane is located, is said to have produced 80,000,000 bushels of wheat. I went through this valley, a part of Yakima and a part of Wenatchee valleys. One wonders at the great productivity of this country when he thinks of the great mountains almost everywhere—mountains where absolutely nothing can grow. The valleys are protected by these mountains. They are for the most part virgin soil. Irrigation projects have brought the melting snow to the ripening fruit and grain. The sun, penetrating into these mountain recesses have brought color and flavor equaled by no other community.

Pity it is that we cannot stay here to see more of this environment. We must go to Portland, Oregon. “We pass Rainier National Park on the left closed to winter tourists, and the towering sentinels already mentioned. We are in sight of them until we get to Portland, nearly two hundred miles away. Portland is a fine city of unusual wealth, fine houses, parks, hotels, banks, more than two hundred miles of street car lines, beautiful stores and public buildings, and flowers, flowers, everywhere flowers. The mountains back of the city are circled by beautiful drives and street car lines, and every sort of house that can be built on the face of the earth, terraced from top to bottom, trees, ferns, flowers, vines, form the most perfect menagerie of vegetation and of art that one can conceive. It looked like the composition of one mind. It was the coöperation of many minds for civic beauty. The view from Council Crest—see it once and you will never forget it if you have any imagination. The Columbia River cutting in half and stretching away for miles in the distance, the towering snow-capped mountains already named above, the beautiful Willamette River whose course for several hundred miles we shall soon follow, the Cascade Range, thousands of acres of fine farms and beautiful farm homes spreading out in every direction as far as the eye can see, a flock of sheep, a few thousand cattle, a herd of ponies and horses, the weird whistle of steamers coming up the river, and trains passing up the several valleys, all seen from Council Crest give you a feeling of scenic beauty that you cannot overcome. What a paradise for botanists. How I would like to have lingered in that environment until the foliage came into their glory! The markets are again gems of beauty. One has to buy whether he needs anything or not. The sellers are so courteous and polite. The arrangement of the products are so unique and artistic; they have so much and so great a variety; the people handling the goods were so clean in their pure white garbs; the tables and stands were immaculately clean; everything put on the market was absolutely clean and pretty. You just had to stop and taste here and there and buy. I bought here several kinds of honey for samples, which I brought six thousand miles home. I carried it all the way. Sage honey, clover honey, alfalfa honey, apple honey, orange honey, olive honey, raspberry honey, etc.

At night I saw a big roller machine actually scrubbing the streets. Beat that if you can. I saw it. The Chamber of Commerce gives out every year free literature telling about the products of the state, and they have a show of the farm and mineral products that simply cannot be equaled anywhere. The market stands I was told were owned by the city and are rented to the farmers and others on condition that only farm-grown products produced by themselves were to be on sale in them. The rent was just a nominal rent to encourage the farmer to bring his wares and sell it.

The Southern Pacific train took us south from Portland. The road leads for many miles up the Willamette River through the most beautiful valley, then up the Umpqua River, and the Umpqua River Valley, and into the Rogue River Valley. The climatic conditions are well adapted for grains, grasses, fruits and walnuts. The growing seasons are especially long, and there is not much danger from frost. The fruit orchards yield from five hundred dollars to a thousand dollars an acre. Some of course with less care, yield much less. The higher figures show the possibilities under the best care. On my way south I saw a great many apples thrown out in the fields. I was advised that the fruit association were not getting their prices, and they were thrown away to save cheap sales. They picked last year 2,650,000 boxes of apples valued at $2,600,000. These apples were the Spitzenbur, Yellow Newton Pippins, Jonathan, Rome Beauty. These are the varieties prized for their color, keeping quality, flavor and conformity to the best types. The trees come into bearing the fourth and fifth years, and increase their yield from one bushel to seven a year, and as they get older the increase may reach twenty boxes a year. Their apple pests are the same as ours. They must spray to get the best results. The trees are not large. The average yield to the acre is from three hundred to four hundred bushels, at a total cost of about forty and sixty cents a bushel.

Large acreages of pear trees of the standard varieties are grown, and they are more prolific bearers. The yield is said to be higher per acre than that of apples. I saw scores and scores of very large pear orchards. The trees are less trouble to care for than apple trees.

I saw thousands and thousands of trees in the Willamette, Umpqua and Rogue River valleys that baffled me to know what they were. They did not look like any sort of trees I had even seen, and yet I did not want to appear too ignorant to my fellow travelers. I had only one way to find out, and that was to ask somebody who knew. They were prune trees. The cost of caring for a prune orchard is said to be from five to seven dollars an acre. The average crop an acre is about five tons. The average value per acre is from $75 to $250. About thirty million tons are produced, and the demand is growing. They have not begun to fill the demand. People are learning more than ever the food and medicinal value of this fruit.

Nearly fifty million pounds of cherries are produced annually at a value of more than two hundred thousand dollars. They yield about six thousand pounds to the acre at a profit of from one hundred to eight hundred dollars an acre. In Western Oregon, the Upper Columbian Valley, and the southwestern part of the state peaches are grown on a large scale and at great profit. Grapes, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, loganberries and currants are grown in great quantities. At La Grande, Oregon, there is a sugar beet factory whose capacity is three hundred and fifty tons daily. Beets are grown largely in that section. French walnuts are grown in large quantities. Seedlings are grafted with improved varieties. The largest I ever saw were in the markets. I stopped one night at Grant’s pass and saw some of the largest and finest pumpkins that can be grown in the world.

Stock raising probably stands at the head of the productive resources of the state. Great quantities of cattle, sheep, horses, mules, hogs, and even goats are raised. The income from this industry would be many millions of dollars. Poultry is grown all the year, and millions of dollars are realized yearly from dairying. The annual output of honey is around two million pounds, averaging more than three hundred thousand dollars.

I have said nothing about the fisheries, the fertility of the rivers, lakes and bays, and the lumber conditions. There are about twenty million acres of land in Oregon unappropriated, waiting for brain and brawn. It belongs to the government. You may have it if you will qualify and meet the conditions.

On my way to San Francisco I had planned to stop at Eugene and see the State University, but I found that I could not do so without very much delay, and also because the weather conditions were bad. It is a railway center of considerable importance. Passing Cottage Grove we crossed the Umpqua River and went up the valley some distance, and up the Rogue Valley close by the river of the same name into Grant’s Pass. Here I preferred to stay all night so as not to miss any view or things of interest. We were never out of sight of picturesque scenery and mountains of great height and beauty. Orchards and fine gardens of vegetables were ever in sight. Our train has taken us into Cow Creek Canyon, beautiful and picturesque. Grant’s Pass is the fruit shipping center for this part of the state, and I saw many packing houses. On to Ashland at the foothills of the Siskiyou, where the lythia water and mineral springs attract your attention as you pull into the station, and all get out to try the water as it comes fresh up into the glass receptacles for you to drink. Ahead and around you on every side nothing but mountains towering a mile high. You wonder how you are to scale that tower in your front. Your train takes on another engine, possibly two, and off you go up the Rogue Valley till the Rogue River is lost in the mountain stream. When you can go no further your train cuts across the head of the valley on a high bridge and climbs the opposite mountain parallel to the track you have just come on the other side, going directly north, exactly reversing your course. We zig-zag up that mountain for an hour till we reach an elevation of nearly ten thousand feet. All this time we are in sight of Ashland, fourteen miles below, lying placid, warm and quiet. The snow plows are busy keeping away the snow and the men are clad in the warmest sheep skins from head to foot. A mile off to the left, a thousand feet higher, is “Pilot Rock,” lying as if it had been hurled by some powerful giant. This is the landmark that guided the early pioneers and Indians in their early explorations through that unknown country. Freeing our train from her extra engines, we sped off at a tangent through a fine growth of timber and cut over land. This is the Shasta route, and we have just scaled the Siskiyou Mountains. Now we start down the slope, entering the Cantara Loop and crossing at the very head of the Sacramento River.

Now we have crossed the line into California. Mount Shasta, the most majestic peak of the western continent, fourteen thousand feet and more, towers above us, and off at some distance. We enter Sacramento River Canyon and stop at Shasta Springs, which is a source of this river. There we got off the train and drank the finest water that ever came from the earth. This is probably the greatest summer resort on the Pacific Coast. I saw one rabbit sitting in his burrow on the side of the hill. The snow was falling terrifically.

Miles and miles down this canyon we go, passing ferns and moss hanging from a thousand crags. We pass Castle Crags away to the west like sentinels guarding our entrance. More than four hundred miles we go, following this tortuous river valley until it spreads out into San Francisco Bay. We pass Chico, a community of fruit interest and great vineyards. If one will look at the map of the state of California he will see that almost all the state is included in two great valleys, especially in the northern part of the state called Northern California. These valleys lie north of the Sierra Madre Mountains, which form the natural divide between Northern and Southern California. These are the valleys of Sacramento adjacent to the Sacramento River, which runs the entire length of the valley and into the Straits of Carquinez and into the San Francisco Bay. The other valley is San Joaquin. In the first of these is located Sacramento, the capital of the state, and in the second valley is Fresno, near the southern part of the valley, and also Bakersfield.

We are told that about half of the cultivated land in California, or that which may be cultivated, is in the valleys. They form more than fourteen million acres. They are about four hundred and fifty miles long and more than forty miles wide. The Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers are the drainage for this great basin. These two great rivers come together near Walnut Grove, one from the south and one from the north. I traveled the entire valleys of both these rivers. There are almost three millions of acres in the Sacramento Valley alone, and from my observation not more than half of it seems to be in cultivation. Thousands of acres of it are in citrous fruits and other fruits and walnuts. At the same time of my visit large areas of the two valleys were under water. The lands are rich and yield readily to various kinds of cultivation.

When the overflow from the rivers during the rainy season is controlled, there is no reason why these lands should not be more valuable to the state. Large areas are still in the formation, and look as if they might make great rice plantations. I heard while out there that something was being done to get Japanese farmers to work these low areas into rice farms.

I stopped one night at Redding. This is only a few miles inside of the state line. It was here that the “Gold Rush” was made in 1849. Some of the old settlers are still here and remember the “rush.” I was told that two per cent of our gold still comes from this community. It was here that I really saw the first sign of California. The next morning after my arrival, while waiting for my train, I saw oranges in the parks and about the homes near the central part of the town. Magnolia trees and palm trees showed that we were in a new and strange country. Tropical plants of one sort or another can be grown from one end of the state to the other. One man said that he could pick oranges at the same time watch the melting snow on the nearby mountains.

The rainfall varies from fifteen to thirty inches, whether in the lower or upper part of the state. Irrigation projects are on foot, and furnish all the water needed for the crops. As the acreage increases these projects will grow. Sacramento River and Feather River are the main sources of water for this upper country. I traveled through both of these valleys and to the very mouth of the rivers.

We arrived at Benecia late in the afternoon, and the entire train is put aboard the largest ferry boat in the world, and carried across four miles to Port Costa, across the Strait of Carquinez. We pass Richmond, Berkley, Oakland. At Oakland we pull into the Oakland ferry and disembark again to a large ferry boat, and in twenty minutes we are in the city of San Francisco. We are here for only a few days, then we leave for the southern part of the state. We reserve our impressions of the city till our return.

The other valley further south is supposed to be eleven thousand square miles, and has about seven million acres of arable land. It is a boundless area and productive of the greatest quantity of oranges, olives, grapes, etc. We spent a part of two days at Fresno, and addressed the colored Baptist Church at night. There are some colored farmers in that section who are doing well on their farms. We regretted very much that we could not count them by the thousand. They are altogether too few.

Bakersfield, which is in the southern part of this valley, is a great oil section of the state. There are four such centers in this state. Their combined output a few years ago was ninety-two million barrels. Oil has taken the place of coal in almost all the industries of the state. The refineries are seen almost everywhere. Stock raising, grapes, orange orchards, peach orchards, olive orchards, fig orchards border every road. I saw at least one flock of sheep numbering more than three thousand.

We crossed the Sierra Madre over the Tehachapi loop at an elevation of more than seven thousand feet. Going down the mountain we passed into the great Mojave Desert. Death Valley, 290 feet below sea level, forms a part of this desert. There must be several thousand square miles of country in this area, and I would not give fifty cents for the whole of it. The discovery of oil may give value or the irrigation projects may save it for farm developments. Yucca, sage and sand seemed to be its chief products at present. Mojave, Lancaster and San Fernando are our next stop. A few hours later we are in Los Angeles.

The object of my trip West was to study farming conditions with reference to the colored people and to acquaint myself with living conditions in that part of the country.

There is little that I can say about Southern California, and Los Angeles especially, that the world does not know. It is separated from the northern part of the state by the range of mountains already referred to, known as the Tehachapi Mountains, which are a part of the Sierra Madre. There are seven counties south of this mountain divide. It has a reputed population of more than six hundred thousand people. They represent every nationality. There are forty-five thousand colored people in the city. The state as a whole is the most cosmopolitan I ever saw.

I wanted to take some data from the printed matter sent out from the Chamber of Commerce. The products of the county must measure in a very large way the industry and happiness of the citizens.

It is the leading county in the United States in the value of all crops. It ranks first in the value of farm property, in the value of all farm crops, in the value of fruits and nuts, hay and forage, dairy products, bearing lemon trees, beet sugar production, and in bearing olive trees. It ranks second in poultry, bearing orange trees, irrigation enterprise, and walnuts products.

The conduit which brings the city water for more than two hundred miles was built at a cost of twenty-five million dollars. There are four trans-continental railways that enter the city of Los Angeles, and probably a dozen other smaller lines. They have more than twelve hundred miles of improved streets and more than nine miles of sewer. There are twenty-five public parks. I visited a number of them. They have more than five hundred miles of electrical car lines and more than a thousand miles of electrical lines running to all parts of the county. Their schools are the best in the whole country. They have hundreds of churches that are well attended.

I took daily tours to many of the suburban towns in twenty and thirty miles radius. Culver City, Santa Monica, Venice, Beverly, Hollywood, Long Beach, Redondo, Pasadena, Pomona, Claremont, Ontario, San Gabriel, Burbank, etc. These are all beautiful spots. Some of them are real little cities with every modern facility. I thought at the time of my visit that if people who live under such an environment as I saw were not happy, they have no need to go to heaven when they die. They told me that I ought to have made my trip in the summer when I could see the country in its glory. I went in an auto bus to San Bernardino seventy miles through the country to the orange show. It is called the Gate City to Southern California. The county itself is a wonder in its output of fruits and walnuts, oranges especially. I saw millions of bushels of the yellow fruit everywhere for miles and miles till the eye tired of seeing what I called an awful waste of nature’s products. The city is called the commercial center of the orange belt. It is a beautifully laid out city with semi-tropical plants growing everywhere, luxuriantly beautiful. The show takes up more than an acre of ground, and oranges were blended in the most gorgeous display in every conceivable figure. Oranges, lemons, grape fruit and their by-products by the millions.

The trip through the valley took me over the finest roads in the world. They could not be finer. I was more than interested to pass “Garrett and Company’s” vineyards, one of the homes of the Virginia Dare products. Mr. Garrett himself is an Enfield, N. C., man. The extracts are bound to be right if it is “Virginia Dare.”

What is said of any one of the southern counties may be well said of any other, except perhaps the “Imperial Valley County.” I did not go to that county, but from what I heard about the county it looks as if a special edict was issued from the maker of all the counties to do some special work on that county alone. It was the last county formed in the state, and its area is more than four thousand square miles. It is in the extreme southwest part of the state. The lay of the land, the soil itself, the climate, location, altitude make it the best place in the world for stock raising and fruit production. There are more turkeys grown in this one county than in other similar sections in the world.

I was very much impressed with the fine school houses and churches. No money or care seemed to be lacking in the construction of these important centers. Every one I saw in the country or city was decked with profusive growths of shrubbery and flowers. While I was in Spokane, the city claimed the lowest death rate per thousand of its populations. When I was in Seattle that city claimed the same thing. When I was in Tacoma they claimed they had the lowest death rate; when in Sacramento they claimed to have the lowest death rate. In San Francisco they claimed the lowest death rate; Oakland claimed the same; Los Angeles claimed the lowest also. When we were crossing the Tehachapi Mountains ten thousand feet elevation I saw a fine graveyard up further on the side of the hill, and I was surprised. They might have been soldiers killed in the war. One almost wonders why folks should ever die in such a beautiful country. Conditions are so good for living right along. Good churches, excellent schools, clean cities, perfect climate, all must contribute greatly to long life. They ought to be happy, but happiness cannot be bought with luxuries; it contributes more than anything else to long life when other conditions are good.

The city of Los Angeles is twenty miles from the Pacific Ocean, and I venture to predict that in less than twenty years the city will extend and include Venice, Santa Monica, Long Beach and all the little coast towns along the water front, and the largest ocean vessels will be doing business in the heart of the business section as they are in Seattle, Tacoma, Portland, San Francisco, Oakland. Their population will soon be in the millions. It is growing by leaps and bounds every day, every week and every month. Fourteen thousand people come there every year. The people are busy everywhere. They have the secret of getting a larger population. Create industrial interests and the folks follow. Good schools and good churches; a community in which there is compatibility between all classes and not hatred. These are the best drawing cards.

One does not travel many miles in California without asking questions. Many of the questions will have to be answered by history. Cortez, Juan Rodriguez, Cabrillo, Don Gasper de Portola, Fray Junipero Serre are familiar names in its early history. The country was known as Alta and Baja, which was upper and lower California. It began in the extreme southern part of the state and went as far north as the foot of man could tread. The old maps show the southern part of the state as being a part of Mexico. It was sometimes called the land of the Heart’s Desire. To use the words of another it was in 1769, “That destiny marked Southern California for its own, ordering the fig and the vine to make soft the dessert wastes, lemon and orange bloom for the upland slopes, herds for a thousand hills, living water to make green the sun-browned land; and, last, not the dream of seven mythical cities of gold, but the bright reality of thrice seven times seven golden cities that now throb with the tides of commerce and the tread of countless feet.”

At the beginning of its history the King of Spain ordered that in order to make the country safe for Spain and its religion, that missions should be established. Under the orders of the great Catholic church fifteen or more missions were established—fifteen of them along the coast. My trip back to San Francisco, five hundred miles north, took me along the Pacific Coast in sight of many of these missions. We follow what was called the “Highway of the King.” Those we passed were San Buenaventura, Santa Barbara, San Miguel, and Santa Clara. The southern part of the state especially owes a lot to these early missionaries. They gave harbor to the traveler, irrigated the land and started the early settlers and Indians to farming.

From San Francisco to Los Angeles along the coast is a country backed by mountains of great height and beauty with slopes and valleys surpassing any description. For hundreds of miles our train slipped right along the edge of the Pacific waters, sometimes forty or a hundred feet above these waters, sometimes nearer, then off on a hill top, then across an arm of the sea, then headlong toward the water as if to go right into it, only to swerve around some high hill and then out into some beautiful valley. You have to see it to appreciate it.

Passing San Fernando, Oxnard, Ventura, we come to Santa Barbara in Santa Barbara County. The county is mountainous and has four large valleys. The valleys are the Santa Ynez, Los Alamos, Lompoc, and Santa Maria. The last named valley is said to have four hundred square miles, and can support ten times its population. Mustard seed is the leading agricultural product in the county. The whole county is well adapted to all vegetables and fruits that are common to that part of the state. I saw many orchards of great size. It is said that three-fifths of the prunes and three-fourths of the apples grown in the state grow in these valleys adjacent to the coast. This is due to the fact that perhaps the rainfalls is greater than further inland. Printed matter on this section tell us that the products of this coast range are the following: beet sugar, wheat, barley, hay, garden seed, oil, coal, asphaltum, cement, lime, live stock, butter and cheese, fruits, berries, vegetables, olive oil, walnuts.

I saw great flocks of sheep, cattle and horses. Millions of wild ducks, and we were never out of sight of sea gulls. They are the scavengers on land and water. I was fortunate in meeting people here and there who could give me lots of the sort of information I wanted.

As our train rounded the coast of Santa Barbara we caught sight of the Islands of Santa Cruz, Santa Rosa, San Miguel. They may have been thirty miles to our left.

Passing Point Conception, a lighthouse here and there, a large open field in the actual making, or a sandhill thrown up in the past few months, crossing Santa Maria River, leaving Lompoc and Ynez Valleys behind, we came to San Louis Obispo. Great quantities of oil are delivered to this port for shipment. It is also the seat of the state polytechnic school. The rainfall here is very light, so that farming is not profitable. The western slopes of the mountains for nearly a hundred miles afford good grazing for cattle and sheep. The water is largely mist from the Pacific Ocean with a very low rainfall. At this point our train leaves the sight of the coast and we climb the Coastal Range, being pulled by three powerful steam engines up an elevation of great height, more than seven thousand feet, and head into the Salinas and Santa Clara Valley. Salinas Valley has an area of 500,000 acres and the two valleys are almost 150 miles in length and fifty miles wide. We head toward “Bishop Peak” no less than four times climbing this mountain. We go down into Monterey County and follow the Salina River till we get to Monterey Bay near Del Monte. Santa Cruz is our next stop. We pass the Lick Observatory. We enter Santa Clara Valley crossing the mountains by the same name. We also pass Stanford University. We leave San Mateo County on the left and we speed along. We pass San Jose. Dark covers us, but at Redwood City we come into sight of San Francisco Bay and thirty miles further we are in San Francisco again.

Five hundred miles are covered in about fourteen hours. The mountain ranges on both sides for several hundred miles, and the mountain on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other for several more hundred miles with an ever changing view of mountain inclines, rivers, valleys, irrigation projects here and there, the excitement of high elevation, crossing some divide, farming operations throughout the entire course, fruit orchards, vineyards, gardens, great flocks of sheep, cattle, etc., chateaux, villages, mining operations and oil wells. This is the panorama that simply bewitches the brain. It was such as this that the old colored preacher saw when he could no longer contain his emotions when he said, “My God, look at that Glory.” It is glory, and the man whose soul does not feel it is dead. Add to this the ocean scene with every angle the train makes, the steamers away out, the sunset behind these beautiful waters, and do you wonder that I have been dreaming this thing every night since I had the experience of it. It gets into your soul in some way. Some one has said, “Its all California from east to west, from north to south.” I traveled two thousand miles in the state alone in every direction. The inspiration is the same.

I spoke in one of the largest churches out there, heard some of the finest speakers in the world, saw some of the best shows, tramped over some of the orange, apple, fig, prune and berry orchards, bee and poultry yards. I visited soldiers’ homes, city parks, city museums and farms in the country. I visited some of the best schools in the West and Northwest, including the state universities where they are really doing things.

Our eyes are now set toward the east and home. We are at San Francisco. Before we leave here we must revert to the lower part of the state again. The city of Los Angeles gets its water from a distance of more than two hundred miles from the snow-capped slope of Mount Whitney. They are the highest mountains in the United States, except in Alaska. The aqueduct is the largest in the world. The reservoirs are located in the San Fernando Valley. The pipes taking this water from its source to its outlet are eight to ten feet in diameter. Forty miles of this water is run in open lined canals. The line was pointed out to me many miles out of Los Angeles by a fellow traveler who knew the history of its construction.

As one travels from north to south in this state and from east to west he is very much impressed with the great network of wires stretched everywhere, apparently reaching every farmhouse and factory. These are high-powered electric wires carrying power to the industrial centers and to the farms for light and power—for power more than light. Water has to be supplied to all the farms by irrigation. Where gravity does not do the work they must depend on pumps. The electric power is used to run the pumps. This power is generated by the mountain streams hundreds of miles away. The great power plants are largely owned by companies in the East. The irrigation projects, I presume, are the most wonderful in the world. I was advised that it cost about eight dollars an acre to get the canals into operation.

Another interest of great importance in the growth of a country is the public roads. The roads were universally good. I traveled several hundred miles over the public roads in Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties, and for the long stretches I never saw better roads.

Hollywood, which is really a part of the larger city, is a very pretty place. The streets are paved and there was not a shoddy nor a cheaply constructed house to be seen. I counted seven moving picture studios. I had no idea that these studios were built on so vast a scale. It seems that all the stars in the moving picture world have their studios here, and their fine homes—Charlie Chaplin, Douglass Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and others. Many of the great meat packers of Chicago, Omaha and Denver have million-dollar homes in or near this little suburb. The south side of Beverly Hills is covered with these expensive homes.

There are a number of these studios in Culver City. This is a small place about fifteen miles toward the Pacific from Los Angeles. The dominating genius of it is Mr. Harry Culver. Ten years ago it was not born, and today it has a population of about two thousand people. The little railroad station, the little homes, the well paved streets and business houses, all show signs of taste and industry. Here is where “Fatty Arbuckle” got his start, and his studio is still there as a reminder. Several boulevards and electric lines pass through the town from Los Angeles to the Pacific Ocean, which is only five miles away. Venice, with a dozen other settlements along the coast for ten or more miles, is the Coney Island of Southern California. Street cars and boulevards give one ready access to every part of the beach. They have all the eating houses, cheap shows, swindling games and junk shops for the attractions.

The building lots in some of these little villages are sold under restrictions. I was curious to know the restrictions. Houses that are put on them must not cost less than twenty-five hundred dollars, and no lot shall be sold to any one except purely Anglo-Saxon—a fine opportunity for unanimity of spirit and exclusiveness if not tested under the state law by some ubiquitous spirit.

The problem of racial identity is a complex one in that country. I saw Mexicans who looked all the world like Negroes, and Negroes who looked all the world like Mexicans. Their language was the only distinguishing features, and in many cases the Negroes were better clad and better groomed. Negroes spoke the unadulterated English language. Their Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana or Texas previous environment may have given them more of the Southern brogue. The Mexicans have clung to their Spanish tongue or some broken dialect. Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, Porto Ricans and others form another group. Then there is another group from northern Europe and southern Europe belonging to the white races, and all these units speak a language of their own and follow largely the customs of their country. I wondered who was fit and who could qualify under “The Restrictions.”

I will say nothing about Chicago, but let me start at Butte, Montana. From Butte, Montana, to Spokane, Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, San Francisco, Oakland, Fresno, Los Angeles to the least city in the West there are all sorts of secret organizations and labor unions, selfish and otherwise, cliques and clans, to whom you must pay obeisance. Add to this the rankest Bolsheviki spirit, from the four ends of the earth, and you have a problem worth the attention of our best statesmen.

I have been trying to get away from San Francisco, but it is hard to leave a community of so inviting environment. I can only name a few places now that are strikingly full of interest. Here is the Golden Gate Park, over yonder a short distance the Presidio, a little further around on the bay the Art Palace. Here is where the exposition was held. Down on the beach are the Sutro baths and cliff houses. From this fine eminence I saw seven seals, some sleeping, some bathing, some growling. They were on the rock a few hundred feet off the beach. Rural paintings in the museums, depicting wild animal life in their natural setting with the mountain background, etc., were very real.

The Southern Pacific station, located between Third and Fourth streets, and the ferry at the foot of Market Street, or at the head possibly, are works of art. They are the last word on station building. Market Street has four electric lines, and it is the leading thoroughfare of the city. Practically all the other streets of the city run into it at some angle. Sixteen blocks from the ferry is the civic center. Here are located the city auditorium, which seats ten or twelve thousand people, the courthouse, one of the finest buildings in the state next to the capitol itself, the city library, and one of the high schools. These are circled about a square which has a large fountain of flowing water. A very large area of the city was burned when the earthquake was some years ago, but this has been rebuilt so well and completely that one would never know it. I went over most of this area.

I visited the University of California, which is located in Berkley, and had only time to go through the library and agricultural building. They have a campus of 264 acres and an enrollment of ten thousand students. They have a theater that seats ten thousand people. They have a tower 302 feet high built of white granite. In this tower is located the clock and chimes. They have in mind a large project for an athletic field and stadium. This will be located back of the college in the hills, which is the property of the college. Oakland is the San Francisco terminal of three trans-continental railroads. They are the Southern Pacific, the Western Pacific, and the Santa Fe.

We take the Western Pacific for Sacramento at 9 o’clock in the morning. At 2 o’clock in the afternoon we have made the trip of more than a hundred miles through the San Joaquin Valley and again into Sacramento Valley. We spend a part of two days here. The state capitol is a very fine building. The ground adjoining the building forms the finest park in the world. They have searched all the world to find trees and rare plants for this wonderful park. They have them from every known country and from every accessible community. Many of these trees were in full bloom the 28th of February when I was there. An officer of the grounds told me to find the keeper and he would give me all the cuttings I wanted, but unfortunately I could not find him.

The city is located in rather a flat country. It has not been a great many years, geologically, since this was all under water and a part of San Francisco Bay. The two large rivers intersecting this valley have done their work in transporting silt, sand and debris from the mountains so well that most of the community is inhabited. The periodical overflow of these rivers still gives the traveler an idea that it is a part of the bay. I saw nearly a hundred miles of it under water, when I wondered how the farmers got from the house to the barn.

We leave Sacramento at midnight on the Western Pacific Railroad for Salt Lake City, Utah. We pass Marysville, which we have already seen on our southern journey, Oroville a little further north, and we follow the Feather River and the Feather River Canyon. At daylight we find ourselves climbing the mountains again in snow several feet deep. The canyons are narrow and deep. The mountains above are beautiful, rugged. Vegetation and all sorts of timber come into sight again. The mountain streams are beautiful and clear. We arrive at Reno Junction about 10 o’clock in the morning. At Paxton we pass the little narrow gauge road leading into Indian Valley. The canyons look too narrow for another railroad, but just below us clinging to the rocks and the mountains the little road leads off into another mining section and through gorges that look impassable.

Of the more than two hundred stations along the way a great many of them are scarcely stopping places. A few are only places for the train crew to examine the cars. At Reno Junction, Nevada, we come into a country that is more open, and where the population is larger.

We cross Honey Valley, Winnemucca Valley, scale the Virginia Range, and come into Smoke Creek Desert, pass to the right of Granite Peak, and we come into Black Rock Desert. We pass what is called the Alkali Flats. This is a vast area of country with no vegetable growth of any sort. Nothing can grow on it. This reminds one of a very large bowl. We are moving along with great speed through the valley with the side of the bowl towering up at a tremendous height. We cross the Antelope Range in the northern part of Granite Spring Valley. A few miles further we come into the little town of Winnemucca. This is a railroad center and a cattle country.

We are in Humboldt County and follow Humbolt River. We have passed Winnemucca Peak, Black Butte, the Eugene Mountains, and other points of interest and beauty. It would tire the reader to follow us for the next several hundred miles through this tortuous river course, through large and small valleys, through mountain gorges, up the side of mountain ranges, over some of the highest peaks, under the tunnels and through great banks of snow. At Sulphur we passed several men and their horses with a big mountain lion they had just killed. The government pays twenty-five dollars for each lion killed. They are destructive to sheep. The Denver Sunday papers had the incident written up in the papers Sunday following the killing.

We cross the Desert Range at Wendover, Utah, and strike out for forty-eight miles through the Great Salt Lake Desert, leaving Grass Mountain Summit to our left, we enter another range of mountains to emerge near the south end of Salt Lake. I do not know the area of the Great Salt Lake Desert, but it is a very large area numbering perhaps several thousand square miles of country. Water and irrigation would do it no good. It looks like desolation carried to the nth degree. It must have been at some time a part of the Salt Lake. It supports absolutely no vegetation of any sort. It is a barren waste.

There is no other place in the world exactly like Salt Lake and Salt Lake City. The city is eighteen miles from the Lake. One cannot drown in the water of this lake because of the density of the water.

The city is one of the best laid out in the world. The mentioning of Salt Lake City suggests to you at once the Mormon Church. This church was organized in 1830 in the state of New York. The Mormons located later in Kirkland, Ohio, and there erected a temple which is said to be standing today. The church was persecuted, and Joseph Smith was martyred. It was moved from place to place, and finally Brigham Young, its President, had a vision. He saw a land in the far west, and was directed to go to this remote country, far away from persecutions, where the colony might worship in their own way. They started out for this far country, and were many months making the trip. The party was composed of 143 men, three women and two children, and three colored servants. The names of all are on the fine monument at the head of the principal street of the city.

When they had reached the place the President said, “This is the place I saw in the vision.” The men were advised to go to work at once on small farms. The first year they grew a good crop by irrigation, but about the time the crops matured the cricket’s came and almost ate the crops. The sea gulls from the lake eighteen miles away came and ate up the crickets. This saved the pioneers. They have in the sacred square a monument to the sea gulls. It is known as the Temple Square. The temple is the most unique building in the world. It was forty years in construction, and it cost a million dollars. It is built of native gray granite which was hauled by teams for more than twenty miles away.

The Tabernacle standing in the same square is also a unique construction. It will seat ten thousand people and has in it one of the best organs made. The building is a “long, oval shape, dome top. The hearing qualities are perfect. One may drop a pin in a hat or on the floor, and two hundred feet away, at the other end of the auditorium, hear it fall.” No nails are used in its construction. Pillows support the arches, while wooden pegs tied with raw hide support the individual pieces.

The gray stone Assembly Hall, where relics and art collections are kept, is also in the same square.

One should visit the state capital. It is located on one of the nearby mountains. This mountain is at the head of several streets and had an electric line running around it and to the top. The building itself is one of the finest in the country. It has large granite supports measuring three or four feet in diameter, twenty or more feet in length, of Georgia marble, polished to a finish, each weighing twenty-five thousand pounds. These great pillows were brought from Georgia on forty-six cars.

One could spend weeks in this fine building studying the art of it and the great display of relics of the early pioneer life. Several Mormon sisters have charge of the collections, and they are very interesting as well as very entertaining.

We leave Salt Lake City, and forty miles east we come to Provo. We are more than four thousand feet in elevation. It is called the “Garden City.” It is near the Wasatch Mountains. We pass through the Provo Canyons. This is unlike anything else we have seen. We climb the mountains overlooking a most beautiful valley off to the left with a very fine stream said to contain trout. There are fine homes and orchards and many flocks of sheep and cattle. There is some mining a few miles across the valley on the opposite mountain side.

A railroad stretches across the valley to connect with this mine from the main line. A few apple orchards. Some fine red barns. The meadows evidently afford a great deal of hay. Hundreds of stacks of hay, as green as if just cut, dotted the valley. We are in several feet of snow and being drawn by several massive steam engines. Up, up, up we go till we reach Soldiers’ Summit, seven thousand and four hundred feet high. Your heart begins to beat a little faster, some one has the headache, another has bleeding of the nose. If you have slept all the way through the valley and up the mountains you will begin to wake up when you reach this high elevation. Unless your heart is seriously affected you do not need to worry, for you are in this elevation only a few minutes, when you begin to drop to normal altitude for these parts. The snow is about six feet deep and sparkling. The air is fine and pure, and your mouth grows dry for some of the crystal liquid you have just passed. It comes from crags and crevices for more than a half mile above you, scarcely missing the sides of your train as it passes its narrow channel.

A crowd of a dozen or more school girls get on the train. They are all the world like our own girls, only they were white, every one of them. They sang songs, made speeches, moved from place to place on the train, recited their lessons, talked kindly of their teachers and their fellows, of the loved ones they have left behind for a few months—they were just school girls, that was all. The tourists, including my lonely self, were glad to have this merry bunch—this innovation to break the monotony. They leave us at Green River, and we settle down again to our usual repose when we are soon disturbed by the news butcher saying, “The mountain ahead is one-half mile high, the canyon ten feet wide, just wide enough for the train to pass.” “It is Castle Gate.” The walls of the red stone stand up like the walls of a sixty-story sky-scraper. On both sides these walls tower up till your neck tires looking up at them.

Here the engineers have defied nature. You follow the river and the canyon, sometimes on this side, sometimes on that side, rising and falling in elevation till you reach Mack, near the state line of Colorado at an elevation of four thousand and five feet. You pass through a valley widening out from a ten-foot gorge to forty or fifty miles, and absolutely fenced all around by these massive walls for fifty or more miles as effectively as if done by the master hand of some giant. We follow Hog Back Canyon and a tributary of the Colorado River. We arrive at Glenwood Hot Springs at 10:30 at night, four hundred miles from Salt Lake City in an elevation of five thousand and seven hundred feet. We stop here for the night and take the 6 a. m. train the next morning for Denver.

We are on the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. We pass up the Colorado River Canyon. The road is tortuous, the stream abounds like the waters of “Galore,” the mountain crags are high and precipitous, every foot has tested the skill of the engineer. It is wonderful. We go through Tennessee Pass, sight Mount Jackson toward the west. Mount Elbert to the left more than fourteen thousand feet high is seen. We leave Readville to the left and pass through the richest mining region in the world. Georgetown, Red Cliff, Fair Play, Platt Ranch, Buena Vista, Cripple Creek, Anaconda Goldfield. All these are centers of mining interests. They abound in gold, silver, lead, copper, zinc, etc. We come south from Glenwood Springs to Salida nearly a hundred miles and into the Arkansas River Valley and follow this river to Florence and Pueblo.

It will be remembered that in the summer of 1921 there was a cloudburst in that section of the country, and Pueblo was in the midst of the washout. Hundreds of lives and millions of dollars worth of property were lost. The valley still shows great evidence of that destruction everywhere you look. This was particularly true of the city itself. I stood under the pier of their fine station, and the high water mark was two feet above my head. We are seven hundred miles from Salt Lake City and still seventy-five miles from Denver. We are at Colorado Springs. Denver is our destination for the night. As we leave Cannon City and Florence we sight to our north perhaps a hundred miles Pike’s Peak. This is early in the afternoon, and we do not lose sight of that majestic wonder of the world until we have passed Denver for almost another hundred miles.

We spend four days in Denver very pleasantly and profitably. It is the “Mile High City.” We have left all the mountains behind. The community, including Colorado Hot Springs and Denver and Pike’s Peak need no description from me. They are too well known. It is the healthiest place in all the world. I saw no graveyards, and I presume they are few and very far between. The elevation is more than five thousand feet. We are now seven hundred and fifty miles east of Salt Lake City. Denver is a fine place in which to live. I am not so sure about the conditions of earning a living.

We leave Denver at 10 in the morning and stop for the night at Phillipsburg in Kansas. The country is practically all prairie land suited for cattle, horses and sheep, corn, wheat, and the grasses. It is an open country with few trees excepting the low sections and river bottoms.

We pass Lincoln City in Nebraska and later the city of Omaha. We have already crossed the La Platte River and now at Omaha we cross the Missouri River. Passing Council Bluffs in Iowa we speed along to Des Moines, Iowa, where we plan to spend the next night. We arrived late in the evening and left early the next morning for Chicago. The country was largely given to farming and stock raising.

We were in Chicago about two weeks, and were then off for Washington City, where we spent another week, then we came home, arriving here at Bricks the 22nd of March. A most cordial reception awaited me here. I was met at the station by teachers, students and friends of the community, all led by the school band.

Not many colored people on the Pacific Coast as compared with our eastern country. They are scattered here and there throughout the middle west. Most of those I saw looked as if they had good jobs and were busy. I saw a great many very nice homes of our colored people. I visited a great many places of business entirely colored. The colored ministers were all educated men. The colored churches were up to date. I spoke in a number of them, and the audience looked well groomed and happy. I quizzed the professional men, and they advised me that the outlook for the colored people generally was good. All advised that colored men going west ought to have some money to start a business.

If colored men would go west and enter farming their opportunities would be unlimited. They ought to have money enough to carry them till their crops come to maturity. If they grow fruit it takes the young trees five years to come into bearing, and they must have something to depend upon during that time. At the same time there is no time of the year in California when a farmer cannot grow vegetables. There are fruit growers’ associations that take care of everything the farmer grows. He can become a member of any of them irrespective of his color. He must have some money and some farming sense. There are forty-five thousand colored people in Los Angeles. Only a few are farming. There are not enough farmers to attract any attention. I am always sorry to see so many of our folks flock to the cities when the farms are offering so many opportunities for independence and a better living.

There is nothing needed in the west so much as water and people—water and people. If they get the people the irrigation projects will soon give the water. They need not only people who are not dependent upon others for every move they make, but people who are industrious and who have the brain.

We hear in the East a great deal about the Japanese. I hear more about them here than I heard on the coast. Out there they have the reputation of being industrious, smart and great organizers. I do not think those are bad qualities. They are qualities that we have been taught to prize. There is no reason why we should prize them in one race and despise them in another. They are universally courteous. Some Northern people think they will get all the land. I saw millions and millions of acres of land in California alone that somebody needs to get and put to use. Then I saw other millions stretched four thousand miles and more across the American continent that will feed all the world when brought under cultivation and development.

They tell us out West that all the mountains in that country are full of minerals. If that is true we have not touched the world’s supply. From the unoccupied land I saw there must be enough to feed a hundred times our present population. In some of these states one can travel almost a hundred miles and not see a sign of human life except the little station settlements. New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and a few other cities are too congested for healthy environment, and some propaganda ought to be started by some organization or somebody to popularize the country and the farms.

The spirit of competition in our large cities in any occupation is virulent. It is not worth the struggle. Manhood and womanhood is stagnant. It is truly the survival of the fittest. I never saw a Negro farmer in the South begging bread. Vast areas of our best farming land ought to be bought by this congested crowd filling our large cities.

Our people go to the city because of the lack of compatibility of people in the community where they want to live. They may not like the other races out West, but there was great silence and a unanimity of opinion relative to an open expression of their hatred. Poor execution of the laws, open expressions of hatred, fear of personal molestation. These were the expressions I met in Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago.

Norman Angell expresses it in his book, “The Fruits of Victory,” when he gives the cause of the world’s restlessness and war. He says they have resulted from our wrong thinking. We have got to be big enough to forget some things and start off right. Correct our thinking. I attended a Christian Science Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, and one of the tenets of their church is that if you have a pain just forget about it and it goes. It seems to work, for that church is doing a great business all over the country. That is what we have got to do in the political world and in the world where our relations interlock. We do not get anywhere by hatred and fighting.

Every city and every town I visited from Spokane to Seattle to San Bernardino, seventeen hundred miles south is on a boom and every one you meet is a boomer. That is the way to build up a community or a city or a town, or anything else. I was not supposed to give any addresses while on this trip, unless there was some fine opportunity to make friends for the American Missionary Association and for Brick School. I could not afford to let such opportunities pass even though I was out seeking recreation and rest and change. This opportunity came to me at least twenty-eight times. I was invited to speak twice in Dr. H. H. Proctor’s Church in Brooklyn, N. Y. Dr. Proctor was a classmate of the writer at Fisk University. He had one of the largest churches in all the South, the First Congregational Church in Atlanta. When the migration of colored people began to be a problem in the Northern centers, Dr. Proctor was called to Brooklyn to meet the impending onrush. He has projected one of the largest church enterprise in Greater New York, and his bringing the enterprise to a successful fruition will mean great things for New York and for the colored people generally.

Dr. Proctor is a large man, mentally and physically, and he has a large vision. His vision is not larger than the times are demanding. Our church people are demanding a larger programme. Some of our churches, perhaps all of them, have been too reticent and conservative, holding on to the dead past and lost prestige with the masses. Dr. Proctor is planning a progressive and constructive programme. I could not lose the opportunity which his kind invitation gave me to tell our Northern friends what our Southern brethren are doing along many lines. I also had the invitation to address a large Baptist Church in Brooklyn where more than a third of its membership of more than three hundred members were from Gloucester County in Virginia. A former Brick School boy was the shepherd of this flock.

Out on Long Island we had the pleasure of addressing a small Congregational Church under the leadership of Rev. G. W. Hinton. We found here a goodly number of our North Carolina friends, and they were glad to hear from their friends here in North Carolina.

Later the Fisk University singers from Nashville, Tenn., met with the Greater New York Fisk Club at the Y. W. C. A. in a Harlem Cafeteria, and a fine programme was given. I was invited to speak at the Baptist Ministers’ meeting in New York in one of the largest churches in the city. If the size of the church, the furnishings, etc., and the appearance of the men meant anything it certainly looked as if our friends in New York City were very prosperous. The young lady who directs all the work of the Y. W. C. A. on 137th Street is a Brick School girl who later graduated from Pratt, and we have every evidence that she is making good in that great city.

At Springfield in Massachusetts we had the pleasure of speaking three times for Rev. William N. DeBerry. Dr. DeBerry is a product of Fisk University and Oberlin Theological School. He has the finest work of any of our men. His church organization is unique; he is progressive and constructive, at the same time scholarly and conservative. He is the most aristocratic Negro preacher we have today. His spirit is contagious, and he has the finest coöperation of his members from the oldest to the youngest.

At Rochester we had the invitation to address a very fine gathering of friends who had met at a reception to the teacher of their Sunday-school class and to the minister of their church.

At Buffalo we also gave an address at another Baptist Church. In all of these places we met scores of people from North Carolina.

In Cleveland, Ohio, I had the invitation to speak several times at the Mount Zion Congregational Church. Rev. Harold Kingsley is the present pastor. Rev. Kingsley is a product of Talladega College, Ala. His wife was a former teacher here at Bricks. We had a most cordial reception at his church and at his home.

It was in this church where I read my first essay nearly forty years ago. Its pastor at that time was Rev. Dr. S. N. Brown, who is now Dean of Theology at Howard University. The church has had a great history. The former pastor was Rev. George V. Clark, of Charlotte, N. C. Dr. Clark was a Liberty County (Georgia) boy and a product of Atlanta University. The church is now in the most congested Negro section of Cleveland and has before it a great destiny and future. The present minister is a young man of great enthusiasm and well prepared to meet its growth. The city of Cleveland has a congested Negro population: I saw a statement in the Cleveland papers from the head of the Cleveland “Community Chest” that of all racial groups in the city the colored people had more than done their part with the least expenditure of effort.

I visited several of the larger churches—Baptist and Methodist churches. All the Cleveland churches seem to be in the most progressive state. Their church buildings are among the very best in the country. Their membership and attendance are very large.

In Detroit we attended Rev. Dr. Bradby’s church, which is said to have a membership of four thousand people. I also spoke at one of the services. They had four services going at the same time. About a third of these people held up their hands indicating that they were from North Carolina. The day was very cold, but their spirits were very warm. Dr. Bradby is a Canadian, but understands thoroughly the Negro temperament, and gives them exactly what is best fitted to that temperament. He speaks with authority.

At night I attended one of our churches ministered to by Rev. Brooks. The church has some institutional feature and is doing excellent service for the community. Mrs. E. E. Scott, of Montgomery, Ala., is assistant in these civic service features.

In Kalamazoo, Mich., we attended a revival meeting in the Methodist Church. The temperature outside did not disturb the emotional elements the least when the several ministers put on the “arousements.” I had to wonder whether I was in northern Michigan or in North Carolina.

I spoke in a Baptist Church in Chicago where they are said to have a membership of ten thousand people. Several services were going on at the same time. I also addressed a congregational audience in Chicago presided over by Rev. Dr. C. W. Burton. Dr. Burton is a product of Talladega College, and Yale Theological School. He is a fine type of minister and is doing great good.

In Butte, Montana, I was told there are about five hundred colored people and three colored churches. These churches had no regular ministers at the time of my visit. The colored men work as porters and miners. They have mixed schools. They have several social clubs and secret orders, such as the Masons and Odd Fellows.

In almost all of the cities I visited mixed schools are the rule, and many of them have a percentage of colored teachers. In Cleveland especially I was told that the colored teachers are liked very much by their students and parents of the opposite races. In many places it would be most difficult to tell who are colored and who are white. Most of the teachers I met are very efficient and alive to their job.

In Tacoma I spoke to the Sunday-school in the morning and in the evening I spoke at the evening services of the First Congregational Church, Rev. Dr. Edgar C. Wheeler, minister. Prof. Oliver H. Richardson, of the University of Washington, followed me with an address on the “Study of International Relations.” The subject of my address might have been “Inter-Racial Relations.” At the close of this address I visited the colored Methodist Church, and also spoke there. The church was well filled, and the services were full of interest. The minister was a well trained man, and had the best order and system in the church.

In Portland I attended a meeting of a select group of ladies and gentlemen of the Theosophical Society. I did not speak, but went primarily to hear an old friend speak on the subject of “Racial Unity.” His lectures covered a number of cities on the coast, and his subjects, “The Unity of Religions,” “Seven Valleys,” “Inter-racial Amity,” “Harmony Between Religion and Science,” “The Mashrak; Ulkar or Universal Science,” “What is a Bahai?” “Four Stages in Man’s Growth.” All of these different lectures are summed up in the one though, “The Fundamental Unity of Races and Religion.” The object of the lectures are the promotion of universal brotherhood, international coöperation, universal education, the abandonment of prejudices. The lecturer was a colored man, a product of Fisk University, and of the law school of Howard University. He has traveled through Europe, Egypt, and Palestine. His thought and language is clear and convincing. Our friend Dr. Gregory proved himself a master with these subjects.

The subjects above are very suggestive. There is nothing else to be said when the speaker has finished his address. What does it mean? In New York, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, St. Paul, and all our large centers there are the finest temples and edifices built to the new cult, new thought, new religion. Many of our traditional churches in these large centers have a hard fight to get a hearing. I attended one of these new thought churches in St. Paul where the interest was at white heat with an attendance of more than seven hundred people. The temperature outside was fourteen degrees below zero. This was at night. All these cults are based in one way or another on the Bible, but we seem to have adapted for our own spiritual edification and practice that which fits our own mind and temperament. We then argue that everybody else is dead wrong. Some of the finest minds I know are lined up with these new cults. Surely they must have some basis for their mental attitude.

I was asked by the Secretary, Rev. Dr. George Hinman, of the American Missionary Association office in San Francisco, to fill an appointment for him in Berkley, Cal., February 26th. This was at the North Congregational Church at Berkley. This church was right under the shadow of the University of California, and I counted it a great honor to be asked to speak there. The minister of the church was Rev. Mr. Ralph Baxter Larkin. He was sick the day of my visit, and I was introduced by Rev. Dr. Sargent. The printed programme announcing the service for the day with my address had this on the first page, “A Church of Reverent Worship, open mind, intellectual freedom, social conscience, spiritual aspiration and human sympathy. It seeks to discover and interpret the meaning of life in the life of the eternal.” This expression gave me great poise for what I had to say. I was at once at ease.

It is fine to speak to people who have a sympathetic spirit especially when you have a feeling that you have an unpopular subject. My racial identity was not clear in the mind of the gentleman who introduced me. He said something like this: “Professor Steiner, of the University of California said somewhere that if he had to be born again he would like to be born a colored man, so that he might be able to study the colored problem from the inside. We have with us today a gentleman who understands the colored problem, and who did not have to be born colored either.” These may not be the exact words, but it is the thought. The first thing that I had to do was to dispel the mind of my audience of the fact or statement just made, that I did not have to be born a colored man, and that I wanted them to know that the traditions of our country and the laws in many, if not all the states, had said that any man is colored who has one iota of Negro blood in his veins. “I am glad to have the honor to address you as a colored man.” Those who know me best tell me that I do not have many stopping places. So I fore-warned my friends in the front of me that sometimes my address was three in one and sometimes one in three. Three in one when I have only one hour in which to speak and one in three when I have three hours in which to speak. Speaking to a Congregational Church, and a white church, too, one has to observe the traditions very closely. These traditions limit us to about thirty minutes, and unless one is very interesting he had better stop in twenty-five minutes. So my address had to be three in thirty.

The audience was scarcely dismissed when a large crowd gathered at the corner of the church to ask more about certain topics which I had only the time to touch. They were seeking to discover and to interpret the meaning of life. I was invited to go home with many friends, but I could not go with all, so a compromise was effected, and several families joined, and I was the guest for the afternoon of these families. One of these families had been missionaries in China. Others had worked among the Japanese. There we were exchanging our experiences each for the edification of the other. We were all happy that our lot had been cast in these divergent directions.

I cannot continue this without becoming monotonous. I was most happily received in a great many other churches, colored as well as white. My message was generally, “The Amistad,” “The American Missionary Association,” “General O. O. Howard and Reconstruction,” “The Schools of the American Missionary Association,” “The Progress of the Colored People,” “Inter-Racial Relations,” etc. One can see a wide latitude in these subjects.

At the theaters we saw several colored stars. In Buffalo Charles Gilpin in “Emperor Jones.” Gilpin is an artist of the first magnitude, but I did not like his selection. I am not a critic of such matters, but it did seem to me that his piece was coarse. It was very popular. One could hardly find seating room in the large house where the play was given.

In New York “Shuffle ’Long” was exciting great interest. There must have been twenty or more taking part in the play, and every character was an artist. I never saw anything finer. These people played in New York in one house for nearly a year, and while the entrance fees were high the house was packed every night.

In Chicago Bert Williams was the whole attraction. I saw him at the Studebaker in “The Loop” just before his breakdown. I was told that after his death the company broke up. They could not find another “Bert Williams.” In his death the race has lost one of the greatest stars in the theatrical world, irrespective of color. It is an awful tragedy of our times that racial prejudice is blind to art when the artist happens to be colored. It is no fault of the artist that he was born colored. The theatrical field has been rather restricted so far as our colored artists are concerned, but wherever they have had the opportunity they have not been found wanting.

“Broadway Rastus and Sambo” are in a class by themselves. The play is clean and fine, every whit of it. It will cure the blues. The singers are the best on the American stage. The vaudeville is equal to any I have seen in the best white theaters.

Every place visited we met very prominent colored men and women who were formerly from North Carolina. We are compiling some interesting data on them which we hope to give to the public later.

In Cleveland we met our old friend Lawyer J. P. Green. He has been a lawyer there for forty years. He has written a splendid book of his life. He has been Recorder of Deeds in Washington, and for several terms member of the Ohio Legislature.

Mr. Charles Smith, whose parents were North Carolina people, has served on the Cleveland police force twenty-five years, and is now retired. His parents lived at Chapel Hill this state, and migrated to Oberlin where he, with several other brothers and sisters, were educated.

Mrs. Mary Talbert, of Buffalo, is President of the Negro Women’s League, which is a national organization of women. She was educated in Oberlin. Her parents migrated there before the Civil War from this state. It would take a chapter to tell what great things she has done for the colored women and what she is now doing. She is a traveler, lecturer and scholar. She has recently raised the money to have the Fred Douglass Home in Washington City as a Memorial to the greatest Negro who ever lived. It will be dedicated the 12th of August, 1922. Her husband, Mr. William Talbert, is a city official in the treasurer’s office, of Buffalo, New York.

Mrs. Clara Hardy, of St. Paul, Minnesota, a sister of Mrs. Talbert, is also a graduate of Oberlin College. She has held many places of honor in her adopted city. She is now Court Bailiff. She is a writer and speaker of no mean ability. Her home was a perfect model.

In California it was my pleasure to stop with Dr. R. R. Robinson. He is a Halifax County man. He was a student here for a number of years working his way with his hands. He laid out our walks, planted many of our older trees and helped to “Start Bricks.” He took an agricultural course at the A. and T. College in this state and went to Tuskegee, where he taught several years. He married a North Carolina girl from Bethel, who was a trained nurse. Later he went to Nashville, Tennessee, and took a course in medicine. After graduating he practiced medicine in Brunswick, Ga., through the flue, and was very successful. After the world war he went to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and was there when the riot broke out. He saved his life by hiding in the woods three days, he and his wife. He lost all his office fixtures and medical instruments, and every remnant of personal apparel. He is now a very successful physician in Los Angeles, California.

I have given only an outline of some impressions of my trip to California with the hope that it may inspire some reader to know, to go, and to acquire a larger vision of the world and of life.

FARM LIFE

For many years the farmer has been the laughing stock of the country. The conduct of his farm and his business methods have brought him more gibes and thrusts than are brought to any other professional class. The late Booker T. Washington described the characteristics of his class many years ago. The poor old mule or horse and often the ox, hitched to a single plow, scratching the earth with as much effectiveness as an old Plymouth Rock rooster would scratch for newly planted oats. The farmer follows behind this slow plodding plow in tatters and rags, illy fed, too often diseased with hook worm or some other infectious malady.

His road sides and ditch banks for ten or twenty feet back are filled with weeds and shrubby growth to sap the vitality from the growing crops in their proximity. He has stagnant pools all over his patch in wet weather to further deplete the growth of his crops that may be left from the weeds by the roadside and ditch banks.

His home, the home of the old farmer, is the last thing to which any attention need be given. He has followed his methods for “Fifty years or more.” He has cotton right up to the door, potatoes, peanuts or corn filling the yard. No place is left for flowers or ornamentation of any sort. The old log house, just a place in which to sleep and in which to hide when it storms outside. It has only two rooms for a large family. The old man is in tatters, the wife is in tatters and the children are in tatters, I have seen many, the least of the little ones, as naked as they came into the world.

The implements of such a farmer never saw shelter or protection from the weather from the time they were bought from the store until they had been disintegrated by rust and rot and had gone back into the original mother earth to rest forevermore.

The farmer himself had a personality that was uninviting and dirty. He thought the good Lord had created him for just the sort of life he was eking out, and he eschewed all progress. Good roads and decent schools were things he never needed and he would not consent for such improvements if they cost him anything. The old mongrel hen was good enough because she could roost in the trees and lay at the same time. The pinewood rooters were all right because they could make their living by eating pine roots and other people’s crops. A half dozen dogs were useful to feed. The old cow was still kept in the family because of the ancestral history and not because of her utility.

Slipshod methods in business have been the handicap of more farmers than all the evils attending them. We very often receive congratulatory letters from business men on our farmers’ programme and at the same time these business men lament the fact that our farmers’ business methods are so poorly managed.

Not long ago we received notice that two of the wealthiest farmers, Negro farmers, in Georgia had died. They were reputed to be worth more than a hundred thousand dollars in cash besides the great land holdings and other property they owned. Later when their estates were settled up their business was in such a tangled condition, all interwoven with that of their neighbors’, that there was nothing left for the wife and children. I hope that we do not have in North Carolina such tangles as the above. Whatever else the farmer does he ought to keep his business straight. We have found out through our Federal Farm Loan Organization that many farmers have bought and paid for farms and have paid taxes on these farms for twenty years, but it would take a “Philadelphia Lawyer” to find out whether the legal owner was the farmer, the banker, or the land company, or the merchant. That is bad business. Any man who mortgages his farm after he has paid for it seriously jeopardizes his future as far as his farm is concerned. If you have debts that must be met you had better sell a portion of your farm outright and keep the other clean and clear. The mortgage business is a bad business for the average farmer to take into his partnership. The merchants, the business men, the state government and national government, are all emphasizing every movement tending to the exit of this mortgage system. The farmer, first of all, should give it a hard kick.

It is a matter of education first. These farmers’ meetings give us an opportunity to inform ourselves. Our schools and our colleges are helping us to get informed. The local conferences have no other purpose than to help you to be informed on farm and business matters relative to your farm. Bulletins sent out by the State and National governments are among the greatest educational agencies. They are all practically free. The farmer who does not and will not take advantage of such agencies of information is certainly destined to be at the foot of the ladder; and there is where he belongs. The farmer who is given all the agencies and says he will not pull himself up ought to go down. The sooner he goes with that spirit the better, so that some other man can take his place and make good. I still see some of these old timers carrying water across the field a half mile away, still taking care of the family wash down by the river side, still holding on to the old ash pile. These relics have been heirlooms in the family and we are reluctant to let them go. It takes some spirit, some purpose and a great will to tear away from these old traditions. It must be done if we are going to advance. We must learn the lessons of experience. They have been sad lessons to many farmers. These farmers’ conferences are bringing to you lessons of scientific farming. Let the traditions go to the wind and take hold of the new problems in your farming and farming business that will bring success, happiness and a life.

Today as never before the farmer is coming into his own. Watch the agricultural papers and magazines. Visit our county and state fairs. See the interest and note the comparisons in our community fairs. Progress is in the air. If there are those who do not believe it, they will believe it, and feel the impress of the upward move, or they must get out of the business. Any farmer, white or colored, who does not line up with the best farming methods of the community is bound to lose out on his farm. The lessons may be hard, but as a class of farmers you must get these lessons.

The first lesson that must come to every farmer is that he must line up or unite with other farmers in the prosecution of his work. Every industry is organized except that of farming. The farmer produces his crops, and, unorganized, sells them to any bidder who comes along and takes his price or nothing. Organization will help the farmer to get the best price for his products. No man works very long by himself at anything. You cannot make it alone. Coöperation is the word. You get coöperation by organization. Every industry that is worth the name is organized.

Organization helps you to buy as well as it helps you to sell. It will get you the lowest prices for what you have to buy, and the highest prices for what you have to sell. Single handed you pay what is charged and sell it for what you can get, much or little. The government is fostering the Federal Farm Loan Organization in order to put the farmer on his feet. Are you using that organization? The state is encouraging farm unions. They can be formed in every community where you can find ten men, ten real men. Are you using this organization? Some communities are using them very effectively. Our own Federal Farm Loan Organization, the Tri-County Federal Farm Loan Organization, of Bricks, N. C., has put into Negro farms and farm improvements about seventy-five thousand dollars and has applications for nearly as much more. Do we have your application?

Let us illustrate what we want to impress relative to coöperation and organization. A few years ago two renters came to the Brick School farm. Each had one horse. The wives had a lot of small children and could not be expected to do very much on the farm. One day I saw a team of two horses plowing. The two men had united their horses and were plowing their ground with a double team. One was plowing and the other man was clearing up the ditch banks. They worked tandem all summer and seemed to get fine results. They were happy in their work and each was company for the other.

A few years ago we needed here on the Brick School farm a peanut thresher. No one could get the thresher alone, so an organization was perfected and a peanut thresher was bought for two hundred dollars. This thresher did fine work for many years, and brought the stockholders a nice little revenue as long as it was in service. I cannot see why a few men in every community cannot unite their efforts and get everything they need on their farms.

Every time I go to Rocky Mount I see scores and scores of wagons on the road hauling tobacco to market. These wagons go in groups for company and mutual help. I have counted as many as twenty in one group, and I am sure the different groups represent a certain community. These communities of small farmers ought to unite and buy jointly a truck. Some of these grouped teams travel, to my personal knowledge, thirty miles with their tobacco. This trip takes two days and one night to land the sale. The teams and the men alike are unfit for work for several days thereafter. Count the cost of man, wagon and animals. The automobile will do the same work in a few hours and be ready instantly for other work. If the farmer drives his wagon half of his time on the road is lost driving this way and that getting out of the road for trucks and automobiles. If you cannot put your products on the market as fast as your neighbor you cannot compete with him. That is all. If you cannot do it single handed unite your forces. That is the commonest of common sense.

Farmers cannot hire ditching done any more. Ditching with pick and shovel is a past art. You cannot pay the price, and you cannot find the ditcher. Ditching is now a profession. The last time we had our work done by hand the gentleman came in a large Buick, worked a few hours for a few days and the job was done. The element of drudgery is too great. We are living in an age of steam and gas and power. Why strain the muscles when you can turn the throttle with the weight of one finger and the work is done? You can buy a machine ditcher, drawn by horse power, for as little as forty dollars. If done with hired help it does not take but a few yards to cost forty dollars. Two mules and a machine ditcher will make more ditches in a day than ten men can make in a week. Here the drudgery is eliminated. Any boy can drive the team. Why not join your forces and buy a ditcher or buy it by yourself? A dozen peanut growers will pay more to thresh their peanuts in one year than a whole peanut outfit will cost. At the same time it is yours and you can thresh your peanuts when you please to do it. You will have the outfit for many years, depending upon the care you give it. We are paying now around ten dollars a cord for cutting wood. The best woodcutters cannot cut more than two cords of wood in the woods a day. Do you know that you can buy a wood saw that will fell the tree and cut up the wood, and that one man can cut as much as fifteen cords in one day? Muscular strength and drudgery are again eliminated. Why not a few of you unite your forces and buy a machine, and in a few days lay in all the wood you need for the winter and summer use? Do you like to trudge along the old way because it is traditional? I do not know of anything more annoying than to have to run to the woods or wood pile morning, noon and night, to cut wood for the preparation of the meal. To me it would be enough to spoil the temper of a saint.

Here is a fine proposition suggested to me by a former Brickite. I am not sure that it is original with him, but it is a fine proposition and I am passing it along:

The average farmer who is working on his own farm or farming on his own account must grow not less than four or five hundred bushels of peanuts yearly or more. Some, to my knowledge, grow eight hundred and a thousand bushels. It usually costs twenty-five cents a sack to thresh this amount. One sack holds about four bushels. It will cost twenty-five dollars to thresh one hundred sacks or four hundred bushels. Form a company of sufficient numbers and let them pay for their stock exactly what they would pay to an outsider for threshing their peanuts. If properly handled it would pay for itself in one year and after that it ought to clear a dividend.

There is one outstanding difficulty in this as in nearly everything in which we engage in coöperative manner. That one man who will take the leadership. Where is he? He must be unselfish, honest and level-headed.

I am speaking especially with reference to farmers who have limited means and not much help. Coöperation and organization ought to mean more than a little partnership. To organize and coöperate for community uplift and progress takes a lot of intelligence and honesty. I would not impugn your citizenship and standing in the community to say that you lacked either as farmers. It is a fact that most of us as farmers are hard to understand some of the simplest business relations. When the business demands that we shall pay our bills by a bank check and require a receipt, and that all these operations should be booked, and when an auditor is called in to balance our accounts and check up our mistakes we are too quick to think that our honesty is questioned. There is no other way to do business when others are involved in that business. The honest man wants to be checked up. It gives him a standing that nothing else will. Treasurers and secretaries of any organization, whether churches, Sunday Schools, secret orders, debating societies, or what not, have no business keeping other people’s money in their personal possession. The banks are the national depositories for all such organizations and other people’s money ought to be kept there.

It should not only be put in the bank, but it ought to be put there to the credit of the institution to which it belongs. This may not be good farming, but it is good business. I know of at least one man who went to the penitentiary for using other people’s money for only a few days and could not replace it. Organizations and companies should demand cancelled checks and receipts for all expenses every so often in a joint meeting. If officers count this an infringement upon their personal integrity dismiss them and get officers who do not so regard it. It is the only way to do business.

We do not organize more and do not succeed better because we lack faith in each other. This is perfectly natural. The Negroes have been schooled in credulousness for a great many years. The encumbrance of so long an inheritance cannot be so easily thrown off. Expect the best that is in your neighbor and your neighbor will prove up to your highest expectation. You not only make your neighbor better by your good thoughts of him, but you add to your own spiritual and mental growth incalculably. You grow yourself.

Farmers must buy modern machinery for their farm. It is the best investment you can make. Corn planters, cotton planters, gang plows, and machinery of every sort that will save you worry and steps should be bought. You cannot afford to farm without these implements. If you do you must be left behind in the occupation of farming. You can not make it. I think a farmer who can buy an automobile ought to be able to buy a tractor engine. With a tractor engine you can plow, harrow, and plant your ground while your neighbor is breaking his ground, and you have beaten him a hundred miles in the manner in which you have prepared the soil. At the close of the day you are not too tired to go with your family to the moving picture show or to some community entertainment where you may get an inspirational uplift for the next day’s work. Look at your neighbors. That is what they do and keep ahead of you.

I think the farmer who is making good ought to buy a Ford car. I saw a big farmer the other day who lived out about eight miles from Rocky Mount. He was driving a horse and buggy. I asked him how much money he had cleared the year before on his farm and he said that he had cleared over and above all expenses about three thousand dollars. It took him a good half day to drive to Rocky Mount for his plow point. He might have saved the trip or run over there in twenty minutes and made his purchase and had the rest of the day for work on his farm if he had owned a Ford car. I am not arguing that one should purchase modern machinery with which to facilitate his work in order to give him more time to be idle. It will give him more time to do the things that machinery cannot do. The good farmer never has idle time. Time spent at a farmers’ conference is not idle time. The matter of getting the latest and best information on farming methods is the most important thing that a farmer can do. One cannot put into practice on his farm or anywhere else what he does not know.

Improved machinery means more intelligence on the farm. Farming is the most complicated and diversified occupation there is in the world. It takes a horticulturist to grow apples to perfection. It takes a dairyman of the best type to put milk and butter on the market to meet state and county inspection and public approval. It takes a mechanic of the highest quality to keep up repair on the farm of fences, houses and machinery. It takes a bookkeeper to keep farm accounts and records. He must be something of a Wall Street broker to keep up with market prices so that he will know how and when to sell his farm products. He must be an electrician and an engineer as well if he is going to compete with his neighbor who lights his house with a Delco light and runs all of his machinery with power.

When you come to live stock you have a world without end of necessary information for your success. Cattle, cows, sheep, hogs, horses, poultry, bees, and scores of special strains of each, every one of them requiring special treatment and expert knowledge. If the farmer has the inclination and the will he can become specialist in any one of these lines. There are men who do nothing but breed the special brands of high bred stock. There are those who breed bees and who supply the world’s demands of purebred queen bees. The higher you go in this specialization the more you become the world’s greatest benefactor.

I have been studying about the value of limes upon the soils. To be a first-class farmer you must be a chemist of the first magnitude. You as farmers, have no idea of the part that chemicals must play in the production of your crops. The fertilizer that will bring to perfection one crop will kill another. You must know the fertilizer and know the nature of the soil on which this fertilizer is to be used and you must know how well a certain grade of fertilizer is adapted to the seed you want to produce. Every first-class farm is a chemical laboratory and the farmer is a chemist. Every first-class farmer must be something of a physicist as well. Every first-class farmer must be something of a doctor as well for all animals are subject to bodily disorders that must be corrected by medical advice. He must also be a weather prophet. You cut your hay and let the storm come on it and see where your profits go. You must be able to read the signs in the heavens and the published directions. Your job is a big one requiring as you go up the most complicated knowledge about every thing under the sun. I have said nothing about plant diseases and insect life affecting the success of the farmer nor that world or destruction hid in the unseen bacteria. As farmers you may be sluggards moving along on the lowest possible level of life or you may be a prince living in a palace. There are a lot of us on the lower levels who ought to move up to the higher gradations. You can get more out of your farm life but you must know how.

If you expect to work simply as a hireling you will not need this information to any great extent. You only have to do as you are told to do as a hireling. You may never as a hireling be asked to use even your own initiative in an emergency. If you expect to manage a farm you must have initiative and some executive ability. Twenty acres or more constitute a farm. If you have that much land you are a farmer and you must move on your own initiative.

The days of ignorant farming are passing. The government cannot and does not encourage ignorant farming. The times are demanding better schools and better roads. These two improvements are here and the farmers must pay the bills. Your farm must make you a living and enough more to meet these public expenses. If your intelligence will not make the ends meet, then before a great while the taxes will eat you up and your land will go into the ownership of men who have the intelligence to make the land meet the bills for public improvements. As farmers you must subscribe to every public improvement that comes into your community. You must buy stocks, bonds and meet public taxes. These improvements all increase the value of your farm. Selfishness and personal ends must not hold back community progress in any line. You are a part of the community and when you hold back its progress you defeat yourself. Not to know is no longer an excuse. You must know. You cannot stay at home and pride yourself that you never go to a farmers’ meeting and expect to know. Wherever people are gathered together to discuss public problems there you may go to learn. There is where you get in the spirit of things. There is where you get knowledge. There is where you get the inspiration. The spirit of rivalry and competition will go a long way to help us in our farm operations. There is a farmer in Nash County who thinks he can beat every one else in the county growing watermelons. There is a score of farmers in his community quietly trying to beat him. The result is that there are better watermelons grown in that community than in any other community in the county.

RURAL LIFE

(continued)

Farmers’ Congress, August 16, 17, 1921

It is worth very much to any man who is interested in agricultural operations to take a leisurely trip four hundred miles through North Carolina in an automobile. A party of us left Bricks July 11th and joined Rev. P. R. DeBerry in Raleigh. Taking his big Studebaker car, we were off the 12th for a two days trip among the colored farmers of the central and western part of the state.

We were not touring, nor sightseeing, nor joy riding. Our one purpose was to study the land, the people and the conditions under which our colored farmers were living. We wanted to see what conditions were compatible and what were not compatible. The trip took us through about eighteen counties.

We started our study in Edgecombe County. This is the county in which Brick School is located. This county should be the first in all of its operations because of its educational advantages and the inspiration it ought to receive from this institution.

There are in the county now about 25,000 Negroes. These Negroes own 4,000 farms and homes, numbering about 17,000 acres of land. Some individuals own as much as 500 acres. We are sorry to say that most of this land is not under the most improved condition. We have not been able to have in this county a full time farm demonstration agent. The Brick School and our farm meetings have given very much impulse to farm operations, but even this has not reached all the farmers in ways to stimulate them to their greatest efforts. We lack time, money and authority that ought to come directly from the state. It has been demonstrated in other counties that nothing is so valuable in stimulating the farmers as a real, live, wide-a-wake farm demonstration agent who lives and works among the farmers every day. A farm not half developed and not improved is not an asset to the state nor to the owner. It ought to come into the highest state of production, then only does it become wealth.

The school population of this county is about 7,000 children with an enrollment of about 5,000 children, whose average attendance is about 3,000 under the compulsory law. The county has a colored school supervisor who gives the work all of her time. Mrs. Carrie Battle has revolutionized the school work under her charge. She is insistent and tireless. Every one knows her and respects her. Her office is in the courthouse at Tarboro. The white county officials hold her in the highest esteem. The teachers and schoolhouses rank among the best in the state for colored people.

I do not know anything that affects public improvements and progress more than good roads. The farmers are generally slow to vote for good roads, but no class of people appreciate them more than the farmer when they are built. The area of the county is 515 square miles, and yet I have traveled over every part of the county and over some of the best roads in the state. The local papers tell us that a cement road leading across the county is now in process of construction. This road will eventually lead into Raleigh, some fifty miles away.

Halifax County has an area of 681 square miles, with a colored population of nearly 30,000 souls. They own 70,000 acres of land. Their school population is around 10,000, with an enrollment of about 7,000, and an average attendance of about 3,000 children. This county has a colored school supervisor who has done a very fine work among the colored people. The colored people meet every condition set by the state and county for the erection of colored schoolhouses. A few months ago they had raised their part for twelve Rosenwald schoolhouses, and had to wait on the county and state to recoupe their part. They will meet any condition set for them. The colored population is not congested in any one part of the county. They are located in every section of the county and about evenly distributed. Their homes, for the most part, are clean, and their houses are well constructed and show signs of thrift and happiness. Very few colored farmers have migrated from this section of the state. Those who have gone from Halifax County can hardly be missed. This in itself shows that the racial equilibrium is not much disturbed.

Nash County, which joins us on the west, is one of our best farming communities. The fifteen thousand Negroes in the county own more than 25,000 acres of land and more than 2,000 farms. They are a progressive lot of colored people. They have a number of independent schools aside from the public schools. They have excellent churches, and their homes are being built on modern lines. This county has twelve miles of cement road running from Rocky Mount to Nashville, the county seat. The contour of the county is rolling and red clay. The important towns are Nashville, Spring Hope, Middlesex, and let us say a part of Rocky Mount. There is a great deal of the land in this county uncultivated and developed. It waits only for the man who has the brain and the energy. The county has no county farm demonstration agent nor colored school supervisor. I do not know what can be more advantageous to the success of the colored farmer than the addition of a colored farm demonstration agent and a colored school supervisor. While the preachers are ministering to the spiritual needs of our folks and the teachers are directing their intellectual life, and the state and county health offices are looking after the health of the masses, the farm demonstration agents and the colored school supervisors are daily giving inspiration and purpose to rural life everywhere. The state and county are the direct beneficiaries of the work of these two agents. Having five children go to school every day from one family where formerly only three went means very much for the literacy of the state.

Teaching boys how to grow forty bushels of corn on the same acreage where their fathers could grow only ten is adding very much to the wealth of the state. The community which does not appreciate and recognize this truth is impervious to eternal values. Every farmers’ conference tells how much increase there has been in corn, peas, cotton, peanuts, oats, rye, tobacco, and other things under the direction of our farm demonstration agents.

We pass through Franklin County into Wake. Every one knows that Raleigh is in Wake County. As soon as you arrive in Wakefield or Zebulon, both small country hamlets, you know that you must be about fifteen miles from the capital city. Hard-surfaced roads present such a temptation to touch the accelerator just a little, and little, and again a little more, and again, if you do not happen to see any motorcycles lurking about. The colored population of this county is less than 30,000, and they own less than 6,000 farms. They own about 60,000 acres of land. Their school population is about 10,000, with an enrollment of about 7,000, and an average daily attendance of about 4,000 children. We ought to expect the school average to be higher, of course, being adjacent to the seat of state authority. Wake County has had for a number of years two colored agents, in the person of Miss Delany for the schools, and Professor Roberts for the farmers. They have gone in and out of the farm homes daily carrying inspiration and encouragement and inspiring hope. The daily contact with these personalities has been the leavening power in the county. We have seen for a number of years the finest products that could be produced on exhibition in our colored State Fair. In the city market in Raleigh every day in the year one will see these same fine farm products. They will do justice to any racial group. Here one will see what the agents are doing to help the farmers to conserve and preserve their products. The homes of the farmers show neatness and cleanliness. We have been greatly surprised to see how far some of our farmers have gone in beautifying their homes and premises. This is as it should be.

The excellent public schools of Raleigh, the fine institutions represented by St. Augustine School and Shaw University have given the colored rural population a great inspiration. The well ordered homes of some of their city cousins have also been an inspiration to the colored rural population.

There are so many opportunities, educational and inspirational, about the state capitol, that it is almost like living under the shadows of a great university. Then the main thoroughfares are so fine that those living in the most remote parts of the county ought to have no difficulty or count it no hardship to go to the city for lectures, recitals, conventions, conferences, and for general consultation with those under state authority. These opportunities are the best sort of unearned increment.

We pass from Wake County to Chatham County. There are no less than 8,000 colored people in Chatham County. They own about 2,000 farms and homes, and about 30,000 acres of land. The two small towns, Moncure and Haywood, have quite a settlement of colored people. At Haywood they seem rather isolated and some of the homes had a progressive appearance. The disadvantages under which we started, the social, industrial, business and educational status, in which we find ourselves should not be allowed to differentiate from other people who live in the same community and in the same environment.

If other racial groups living in the same community have their homes painted, flowers in their gardens and other ornaments that add to home life and beauty, it is perfectly right that we should catch the inspiration. If we cannot be leaders in these matters, we ought to be good followers. We have the labor, and a gallon of paint and a paint brush will work wonders in a few hours. If we cannot keep the yard fence looking decent and in repair let us move it. We must take personal pride in the community in which we live. It is the best sort of civic pride. In this community we ought to prove our best selves. Chatham County has disgraced itself recently with a lynching bee.

Crossing the river into Lee County we were very much impressed with the sign, “You are welcome to Lee County.” This large sign was in a most conspicuous place and we interpreted it to mean what it said, and that we were included in the invitation. We stopped to ponder and to contrast the difference. We have been in parts of our country where the overhead signs read, “Nigers and dogs not wanted.” We have seen in other parts where land was advertised for sale and the biggest asset in the advertisement was the absence of Negroes from the community.

There are less than 4,000 colored people in Lee County. They own about 700 farms and about 8,000 acres of land. The area of the county is very small, and the entire population less than 15,000.

I have been for several years on a local inter-racial committee. Since the world war it has been necessary to have such a committee in the South on inter-racial relations. I am also on the state inter-racial committee. That means that I am always looking out for the small things and the larger things, too, as we make our daily rounds, that count for good will and peace between the two racial groups. At Sanford we saw a large number of colored men at work as carpenters and bricklayers on some of the finest buildings going up in the city. I was shown others and advised that they were the work of colored carpenters, under colored contractors. A former Brick School boy was foreman on one of the jobs. These contractors and workmen were personal friends of mine, and later I had the pleasure of seeing some of their own homes and business. They were among the best in the community. Broadway, Cumnock, and Jonesboro are progressive communities in which the colored people are doing well. I was advised that only a few of the colored people had migrated from this part of the state. It means that they are happy and that they can buy homes in communities that are compatible. After all, we must have compatibility in our homes and in our neighborhood, in our community, in our relations with the outside world. I would not live a week in a community that was not compatible. To receive a gibe and a thrust every time one steps on the street, or into a corner grocery, or on the public highway, by other racial groups is contemptible, and especially so when one knows that there is absolutely no redress for that sort of contempt. One wonders what the preachers are preaching or what the schools are teaching. Patriotism, love of community, social and personal progress are of slow growth in such communities where there is so much incompatibility.

All the world has heard of Moore County. It is an area of 798 square miles. The main line of the Seaboard railroad crosses it from north to south. It is crossed and recrossed by Page’s railroad. Here is Southern Pines, Pinehurst, Jackson Springs, Carthage, and scores of other smaller towns. The names are common to the resorter and tourist. It has a population of less than 6,000 Negroes, who own about 16,000 acres of land. Excluding the villages and towns, twenty-five years ago I would not have paid the taxes for all the rest of the land. Twenty-five years ago I went all over the county, and one could scarcely get anywhere for the sand and roads were practically unknown. Sand, sand, sand—everywhere sand.

Moore County is now the veritable garden spot of the state. The local intersecting railroads have changed hands. Fine public highways have been built in every direction. The tourist and capitalist, making their annual visits to this section, have discovered in that vast land undiscovered possibilities of wealth. Thousands and thousands of acres of this waste have been converted into peach orchards. Peach packing stations have been built all along the track for the convenience of the peach shippers. I was told that several trains of peaches were shipped daily to the Northern market. Where the land was not already planted I saw the Fordson tractors getting it ready for fall planting. Most of this undeveloped land was what is called cut-over land. It is absolutely barren except for a lot of shrubby pines, shrubby oaks and some native tough grasses and wild composite flowers. Tupelle and poplar may be found in the swamps and lowlands.

I wondered as I passed along to get a bit of information here and there, if our colored people were learning to do by doing. I wondered if they were getting the inspiration. Sixteen thousand acres of land ought to be the nucleus of an industry. A hundred acres ought to make a good peach farm. What an opportunity for the colored man who has brain and industry and some little money and a great ambition. We have not the faintest idea of the wonderful opportunities in the millions of acres of the waste lands of our southern country. These lands are just begging the capitalist to come and invest in the undeveloped resources of its bosom. It is there, but it just needs the brain and some little money. The brawn is there, too; it just needs the intelligent direction. Compatible conditions will keep it there.

The land in Moore County will never again sell for one dollar an acre while peaches are selling for three dollars a bushel at the tree. Most of the trees bear from two to five bushels of peaches. They are planted about fifteen feet apart. It takes about 150 trees to the acre. Any one can figure the income at that rate. These peaches ought to begin bearing in three years. There is nothing so fabulous as the income per acre from such an investment. There is nothing so sure. Some of the rows as we viewed them seemed endless. Greensboro, sixty miles away, was sending trucks to the peach area daily for loads of peaches for the local market, in Greensboro. A little while back one of these peach orchards sold for $85,000.

The business of supervision has become so important that many of the growers combine and employ an expert from the State Department of Agriculture. They can pay more than the state can pay for such expert supervision. The work is as yet in its infancy. We are advising our Negro boys to go to our best agricultural schools and specialize in this department of fruit cultivation so that they can manage such enterprises as these large fruit farms. They do not seem to get the vision. As long as our folks are buying farms, and they are increasing their holdings every year, there are vast opportunities for their services as horticulturists. Ten Negro farmers in Moore County, North Carolina, ought to be able to get together and make peach-growing worth while to the group. Their traditions and the local environment have taken away their inspiration. They also lack knowledge. They have not been schooled in initiative of this sort. Coöperation with most of us has been a doubtful experiment. We must learn and grow more before we can take hold of the larger industries that require large coöperation. Experience and knowledge are vital to the success of any enterprise. The great enterprises of the North have been growing coöperatively since the country was discovered. The South has been giving its time to matters of social adjustments. The adjustment of its racial groups has been its nightmare by day as well as by night. Hatreds, jealousies, prejudices, have entered too much into our daily contact and relations to allow us to grow nationally. The conditions of all progress are in education, industry, compatibility.

I read somewhere that the conscious mind may not get a true perspective and may error. Still it is conscious. When I read in the papers every day and note all the deviltries perpetrated here and there all over the South, I wonder that we have all gotten along as well as we have, and especially do I wonder how the Negro has made such progress. Then I hear that the subconscious mind never errors. The conscious mind would have me riled and leaving the country, boot and baggage, when I read what is happening somewhere else outside of North Carolina. The subconscious mind comes in and says to me, when I am quiet and alone and perhaps when I am half asleep, “No, do not get discouraged.” The South is the garden spot of the world. It has the prettiest moons, the brightest days, its florescence on a thousand hills and in as many vales scatters its fragrance and beauty three hundred and sixty-five days in the year. Its cataracts, rills, and springs sparkle with diamonds of beauty and health. The woods and swamps are filled with every sort of game, her rivers and lakes abound with every known fish for the sportsmen, her climate is the most equitable in the world, the rainfall the most evenly distributed, the storms not so awfully destructive, the exotic population the least of that of any other similar area, with an adapted vegetation from the highest altitudes to the equator. The contour of the surface is high or low as one likes it. Smooth or rough. The Blue Ridge Mountains afford a retreat from the Northern winters as well as a retreat from the Southern sun. Her altitude, pine forest and splendid waters are an asset that no other country in the world can equal. In the next few years more than fifty millions of dollars will be spent in North Carolina alone for public roads. Steam roads and electric cars will soon intersect every nook and corner of the state. The most inaccessible parts of the state and the South will become the public highways. Automobiles and trucks will bring the most remote farms to the city markets daily. The telephone and radio are already available in our country homes.

In the next two years North Carolina will spend four millions of dollars for Negro health and education. This has already been passed by state Legislature. This amount of money put into health and education in any community will make a change. It shows an enlightenment of public sentiment and a change of attitude on the part of the citizens of the state. Progress cannot and will not be thwarted. Education, enlightenment, Christianity—this trio is the saving grace of any community. I do not know of any place better than North Carolina. This is my subconscious mind. It never errors.

We leave Moore County and cross into Montgomery County. This is what we call a hickory country. The land is rocky and red with hills almost precipitous. We could not visit many of the colored people because of the inaccessibility of most of the rural homes. The colored population is about 4,000, and they pay taxes on about 8,000 acres of land. They are engaged in general agriculture, corn, tobacco and cotton being their prevailing crops. They have a few cotton factories in the town of Troy and more in the county, and many lumber mills. The Pedee River and its tributaries furnish a large part of the power for the factory work. The county has a real gold mine which was profitably worked a few years ago. It was my pleasure to visit it some years ago when it was in operation. It has been abandoned, and the machinery and buildings show signs of a past prosperity.

The town of Troy has one of the two wooden courthouses left in the state. It was being replaced by a modern stone structure. It will cost when finished about $200,000. I am told that the stone in the construction of this building was taken from the site on which the building stands. It rather reminds one of our Northern centers in that it stands at the juncture of a number of the public roads leading into the town.

The Peabody School, under the auspices of the American Missionary Association of New York, is the only institution in all of that part of the country giving anything like a high school education to the colored people in all of that section of the country. The school is beautiful for its location just out of the city. It fronts a public road and is on high ground with splendid drainage. Several of their buildings are new and up-to-date for school purposes.

A hard-surfaced road is in construction from Charlotte to Raleigh. The distance is nearly two hundred miles. It will probably pass through nine counties. It will open up a country of immense possibilities. A cement bridge connecting up this road is already in construction across the Yadkin River. This bridge will be nearly or quite 2,000 feet long. It would ornament the approach to any Northern city.

From Troy we went to Biscoe, Star and Ashboro in Randolph County. This is also an oak and hickory county. The roads took us through a very fine section of the country. The country looks very undeveloped. The roads were very fine. The rural homes appeared rather small. Many of the women along the roads were seen bottoming chairs. Chair-making seemed to be one of the main industries in that section. The frames of the chairs were made at the factories and sent out to the country women to have the bottoms put in them. These bottoms were made of white oak splits. The absence of colored people engaged in this business seemed very noticeable.

The town of Ashboro had all the appearances of being a hustling town. More than a half dozen buildings were going up. We saw no colored carpenters or bricklayers on the job anywhere. We were advised that no colored men were allowed to work at their trade in the town. We saw several colored mechanics with their kit of tools packed, leaving the town. Some of them we knew to be the equal of any mechanics in any other group of workers. Still their mechanical efficiency counted nothing. It was their unfortunate tradition, and their black faces which counted them out. Here my conscious mind came up again. We did not have the feeling that we had when we left Lee County. A man ought to be passed on his merits and not on his color. They wanted mechanics, but not black mechanics. These men would do well to migrate. Wherever they went I know they were in the frame of mind to swear vengeance against any community that would tolerate that sort of condition. That is what makes socialists, bolsheviks, and Catholics out of us.

We soon find ourselves in Guilford County. We arrive in High Point and remain long enough to see friends and inquire about the conditions of our farmers.

I think it true that there are more manufacturers of furniture in this county than in any other county in the state. The Brick School has bought furniture in New York only to await shipment from High Point. Later we have gone to High Point and seen this furniture in the making. These two cities are in the oak and hickory section of the state. I have seen its street cars in Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, Washington, Asheville, Atlanta, Ga., Birmingham, Ala. Of course a business of this size will give work of one sort or another to a great many of our colored laborers. There are 15,000 of our people in Guilford County. They own 3,000 homes and farms. They are paying taxes on 17,000 acres of land. The Negroes in Guilford County have the inspiration of one of the best state colleges for Negroes to be found in the South. The college ought to be the center of all the best influence for farming in a hundred miles about it. If they are found to be using poor farming methods they ought to be fined. Alamance, Orange and Durham counties are rather small counties, but they have some of the best farms and form some of the best farming and industrial communities to be found in the state. Durham is really the emporium for Negro enterprise and thrift. Tobacco, cotton and corn, and some wheat are the leading farm products in this section of the state. Gibsonville, Burlington, Graham and Hillsboro are thriving towns. They are centers of cotton and furniture manufacturing interests.

This study took us through about fifteen counties. We were not investigating the town and city conditions, but the farming interests. In counties where they had rural supervisors there was a marked difference in the attitude and progress of the farmers. Their outward appearance was different from what we saw several years ago. The farmers were better clad; their work animals were in better condition; their teams were not all dilapidated; many of them are using improved machinery; their barns and houses were more orderly built and better maintained; the houses in which they live are a decided improvement over the old houses we usually see along the railroad. They are giving more care to their wells and pumps. They are learning to screen their windows. The ancestral waste barrel in many cases are being removed from their kitchen windows. They are using more paint not only to save their houses, but because it adds beauty to their premises. They are planting flowers. They are putting out fruit trees and investing in thoroughbred chickens, hogs and cows. These are all good signs. They are really coming. Some have had to come from so far down the road that it may appear that they have not made any progress. They are coming nevertheless. At no place where we stopped did we have to confine our diet to sweet potatoes and boiled eggs in order to preserve our health by the osmosis process.

We saw in many places attempts made to improve the soil. We found alfalfa, red clover and crimson clover in the red clay sections. Peas were grown generally. The farm demonstration agents and the farmers’ conferences have been an inspiration to the farmers to grow legumes to help the land to bring forth its fruit. They are learning that they cannot use up the fertility of the soil and still have it. They are learning that an investment in legumes is one of the best they can make for crop productions.

The papers have been saying that one man in four in the American army is uneducated. If that is true it is a sad comment on the conditions of this country. There is no power in the world to equal that of education. We cannot exaggerate its power and its importance. A trained mind, a trained hand and a trained heart are indomitable. An unlettered man lives in isolation. He cannot appreciate the creation of nature. There is no progress in isolation and a static mind atrophies. Whatever be the proportion of illiteracy, those of us who move about among the masses know that notwithstanding our private schools and public schools, ignorance and superstition are simply appalling. It is not only appalling, but it is dangerous to any environment. It is a menace to the state and government.

BRICK SCHOOL IN PERSPECTIVE

Work began at the Brick School in 1895 under the auspices of the American Missionary Association. The “Estes Farm,” named after the owner, General Estes of the Civil War, came into the possession of Mrs. Julia E. Brewster Brick, of Brooklyn, New York, who found it a burden on her hands. Mrs. Brick had visited the community, and her heart had been made sad by the sights which greeted her on every side. The sad faces and depressed spirits in a large environment of Negro congestion appealed to her heart. She was responsive to this appeal. It was the voice of God which she did not mistake.

Her life and thoughts and heart had been attuned to this appeal, and so she sought how best she might help the situation. The advice of General Oliver O. Howard was sought. He introduced Secretary A. F. Beard and Mr. H. W. Hubbard, at the time Treasurer of the American Missionary Association. The result of this counsel was that a large farm of 1,129½ acres of land in North Carolina three miles from the town of Enfield was given to the American Missionary Association for Negro education. With the gift came also from the same source $5,000 for the first building.

There followed other gifts from Mrs. Brick and from the American Missionary Association, so that the farm was soon stocked with hogs, horses, mules, cows and farm implements. Houses of various sorts, including school buildings, dormitories, teachers’ cottages, tenant houses and barns have been put up, valued at several hundred thousand dollars. This beautiful munificence has been our saving grace during the last twenty-seven years of stress and strain in the financial world.

We began work with the modest number of five teachers. We now have about twenty teachers and a few less than 400 students. The students come from a dozen states and from nearly all the counties in North Carolina. The larger number of them comes from a radius of fifty miles.

The purpose of the institution is to teach the students to do the things the best way in the community where they may live. Being rurally situated, the first and greatest appeal must be made along the line of an agricultural education. The knowledge of how to extract from the soil the largest and best products which the community may need for its consumption is an asset in which any group of people may well take pride. Most town and city boys coming to us have an aversion to this form of education, and especially to the strenuousness necessary to an efficient application of the most vital principles of agriculture.

Horses have to be shod, and farmers have to have houses in which to live and under which to shelter their stock. So we have to teach the boys to work in iron and wood. Along with this goes some drawing and planning. Tools and wagons must be kept in repair. Boys going back to their communities ought to be later the real leaders in the community. In many instances they are the leaders.

While the boys are investing their time in the farm crafts and the shop crafts the girls are learning to do needlework and house cleaning, washing and sewing. They learn the home life by getting some of the conventionalities of it here in the classroom under teachers who get from Pratt and Columbia and other good schools the best they have to offer. These teachers are themselves largely the products of our American Missionary Association Schools. They have not been satisfied to “graduate and quit,” but they have continued to study. In addition to giving the boys work on the farm and in the shop, and the girls work in the kitchen, laundry, dining-room and sewing-room, and general house cleaning, all are offered a first-class high school course covering six years, preceded by six years of elementary education.

The writer of these notes is himself a product of Oberlin and Fisk University. He knows how to do a great many things, including typesetting, printing, farming, plumbing, some work in wood, poultry-raising and agriculture, stock husbandry. He lectures, preaches sometimes, and writes for newspapers. He counts himself a fair judge of artistic values wherever they are on exhibition. He knows how utterly impossible it is to try to do any one of the above things with any degree of efficiency or even ordinary skill without mental training. The mind is the master, and unless that has training and poise the hand fails. The academic course is to meet this condition. Many of the boys and girls stay to finish it, but the bulk never finish. Many of them do not stay for the full course—not that they do not have the money in many cases—but because education among the masses it not popular. They have had a propaganda for many years that a little learning is a dangerous thing. They have been advised that they belong to a subject group, and that they need only the rudimentary necessaries of life. A fine horse and buggy or a car and nice clothes make an appeal above any sacrifice for study. It is the appeal for the glitter and the glare. This false notion comes to the half grown youth because they got a bad start. They were neglected in the public schools—parents ignorant of the necessity of education on the one hand, and poorly prepared teachers on the other hand, and poorly furnished and constructed schoolhouses. The whole school environment has not been psychological. It has rather been repulsive.

Some who return to their homes are making good farmers, as evidenced by their better crops, better fertility of their soil, better kept work animals, better kept machinery, better homes, yards, and community life.

Many of those who finish the high school course attend other schools and later enter the ministry, dentistry, or become physicians, teachers, Y. M. C. A. or Y. W. C. A. workers, or instructors in agriculture either in our schools or as county farm demonstration agents. The best examples are Isaac Bunn, farmer, and owns his own farm of 250 acres bought and paid for in Halifax County; Benjamin Bullock, under the Smith-Lever Fund, in charge of agriculture in the colored state college in Texas; Rev. A. S. Croom, Baptist minister, Salisbury, N. C.; Dr. Joseph Harrison, physician, Kinston, N. C.; Dr. Willie Sessoms, dentist, Rocky Mount, N. C.; Dr. R. R. Robinson, physician, Los Angeles, Cal.; Miss Hattie Green, Miss Lucy Richmond McCoy, Miss Susie Adams, Young Women’s Christian Association work, New York; Miss Annie Rhodes, teacher in the city schools of Chicago; Miss Lula Bullock, teacher in city schools, Louisville, Ky.; George Bullock, manual training in city schools of Louisville, Ky.; Joseph Bullock, a captain in the army, and now a student of dentistry. More than a hundred have gone out as graduates, and all are a leavening in the community in which they live. The influence of the Brick School has counted in the community life of the masses more than any other agency in operation. We mean by “Community” the area of a circle of which the school is the center and whose radius is twenty-five miles. We have three counties virtually inside of this circle whose Negro population is more than 60,000. The circle cuts into six other counties whose combined population is more than 148,000 Negroes. The nearest institution under private auspices doing anything like high school work is exactly sixty-three miles away. We have a field all our own. The area in this circle is “our community.”

We have sought all these years to better the community life by reaching the farmers directly. To this end we have annually and semi-annually farmers’ meetings. They come and spend one or two days at our expense for entertainment, where they have contact with our teachers and with men and women sent by the State Department of Agriculture at Raleigh, who lecture on the best methods of farm and home life.

We must do more than talk. We must help them. We have here a local Federal Farm Loan Organization, and this organization in the last three years has put into Negro farms more than $130,000. This money is let by the United States government and on conditions that can be met without hardship to the borrower. Titles are investigated, deeds are properly made, and a new spirit is put into the farmers of the community. We are encouraging our colored men to buy small farms of twenty-five and fifty acres and build for themselves modest homes near their public schools as far as they can, and not too far from their local churches. We advise them to patronize these institutions freely and to build up their community life.

The vision has been a long ways off, like the rainbow, but they have begun to catch it. In these three counties they are paying taxes on more than 100,000 acres of land. Their homes are very much improved. Their churches are excellent for rural communities. They are contributing largely for the Rosenwald schools. In Halifax County they have twelve, and more are now in construction, the colored people paying one-third of the cost.

They have helped us generously to erect several teachers’ cottages here at Bricks, and $5,000 is now pledged for further improvements, which will be paid as soon as farming conditions and prices enable them to do so.

Righteous public sentiment is of slow growth, and one cannot expect to change traditions quickly whose roots have penetrated every strata of society. It takes sympathy, patience, years, work, and some money.

T. S. Inborden.

May 17, 18, 1922.

The JOSEPH K. BRICK
SCHOOL
BRICKS, N. C.

was organized twenty-seven years ago under the general supervision of the American Missionary Association. It offers a first-class High School Course, including Domestic Science, Domestic Art, Agriculture, Work in Iron and Steel, Mechanical Drawing, Instrumental and Vocal Music.

Board, lodging, light, heat, and laundering cost per calendar month, $14.00. Tuition $2.00 and $2.50. Poor boys over sixteen years of age may work out a part or all of this amount.

The School Farm contains 1,129½ acres.

There are 23 school buildings and cottages.

The postoffice handles four mails each day, giving money order, registered mail, parcel post service.

The telegraph and telephone connections are through Enfield, N. C.

Atlantic Coast Line Trains 33 and 34 stop at Bricks on signal.

Prepaid freight may be sent direct to Bricks, N. C. Express may be sent to Enfield, N. C.

The enrollment for last year was 385 students, under the leadership of 22 teachers and officers.

The students maintain religious, musical, and athletic organizations.

There is a student brass band to enliven outdoor sports.

For Catalogue and other information, write

T. S. INBORDEN, Principal

MITCHELL PRINTING CO., RALEIGH

Transcriber’s Notes

- pg 3 Changed: Mojave Desert into Death Valley and to Sanfenando
To: Mojave Desert into Death Valley and to San Fernando

- pg 3 Changed: Santa Barbarbara, Ventura, Gaudaloupe, San Lois Obispo
To: Santa Barbara, Ventura, Guadaloupe, San Luis Obispo

- pg 6 Changed: Minnesota is the synonym for “Gold Metal”
To: Minnesota is the synonym for “Gold Medal”

- pg 6 Changed: To the unitiated it might seem
To: To the uninitiated it might seem

- pg 12 Changed: the towering snow-capped mountins
To: the towering snow-capped mountains

- pg 14 Changed: try the water as it somes fresh
To: try the water as it comes fresh

- pg 15 Changed: southern part of the valley, and also Bakerfield.
To: southern part of the valley, and also Bakersfield.

- pg 16 Changed: largest ferry boat in the forld
To: largest ferry boat in the world

- pg 16 Changed: We crossed the Sierra Madre over the Tehachepi
To: We crossed the Sierra Madre over the Tehachapi

- pg 17 Changed: known as the Tehachepi Mountains
To: known as the Tehachapi Mountains

- pg 17 Changed: fruits and nuts, hay and forage, dairy prducts
To: fruits and nuts, hay and forage, dairy products

- pg 17 Changed: daily tours to many of the surburban towns
To: daily tours to many of the suburban towns

- pg 18 Changed: When we were crossing the Techachepi Mountains
To: When we were crossing the Tehachapi Mountains

- pg 19 Changed: Rodrigeez, Cabrillo, Don Gasper de protola
To: Rodriguez, Cabrillo, Don Gasper de Portola

- pg 19 Changed: said to have four hundred squire miles
To: said to have four hundred square miles

- pg 20 Changed: We also pass Stamford University.
To: We also pass Stanford University.

- pg 21 Changed: public roads in Los Angeles and San Barnardino
To: public roads in Los Angeles and San Bernardino

- pg 24 Changed: We are in Humbolt County
To: We are in Humboldt County

- pg 24 Changed: several hundred miles through this tortious
To: several hundred miles through this tortuous

- pg 26 Changed: The road is tortious,
To: The road is tortuous,

- pg 27 Changed: Passing Council Bull in Iowa
To: Passing Council Bluffs in Iowa

- pg 28 Changed: from Spokane to Seattle to San Barnardino
To: from Spokane to Seattle to San Bernardino

- pg 30 Changed: Dr. Burton is a product of Taladega College
To: Dr. Burton is a product of Talladega College

- pg 32 Changed: I never say anything finer.
To: I never saw anything finer.

- pg 32 Changed: has lost one the greatest stars
To: has lost one of the greatest stars

- pg 32 Changed: but whereever they have had the opportunity
To: but wherever they have had the opportunity

- pg 33 Changed: After the world war he went to Tusla, Oklahoma
To: After the world war he went to Tulsa, Oklahoma

- pg 35 Changed: average farmer to take into his parnership
To: average farmer to take into his partnership

- pg 42 Changed: school poulation is around 10,000
To: school population is around 10,000

- pg 43 Changed: the main thoroughfares ars so fine
To: the main thoroughfares are so fine

- pg 48 Changed: there are more manfacturers of furniture
To: there are more manufacturers of furniture

- pg 48 Changed: college ought to be the certer of all
To: college ought to be the center of all

- pg 48 Changed: preserve our health by the osmos process
To: preserve our health by the osmosis process

- pg 50 Changed: school buildings, domitories, teachers’ cottages
To: school buildings, dormitories, teachers’ cottages

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Table of Contents

- A TRIP TO CALIFORNIA And Several Addresses to the Negro Farmers’ Congress of North Carolina

- INTRODUCTORY
- JUST A MINUTE
- FARM LIFE
- RURAL LIFE
- BRICK SCHOOL IN PERSPECTIVE
- Transcriber’s Notes
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE